The Great Detective

by Delia Sherman

  The inventor stripped off his goggles. “Not at all, Miss Gof.” He shot an irritated look at Dr. Watson, who held his revolver trained steadily upon him. “Please lower your firearm, doctor. There is no danger here.”

  Dr. Watson frowned. “How did you—?”

  “If you wish to abandon your profession, you must stop carrying a stethoscope in your pocket,” Tacy snapped. “Oh, put away the pistol, man. The rascal is right. There is no danger in the world—only a pair of clever-boots with more notions than sense. Arthur, tell me plain: What are you doing here, dressed up like a mad scientist in a pantomime?”

  Sir Arthur wore the uncertain air of a dog standing over a chewed slipper. “Mr. Holmes has been most hospitable.”

  Tacy gaped at him, bereft of words.

  Watson restored the revolver to his pocket, crossed to the table, and removed the gag from the bound figure’s mouth.

  “You will regret that,” Mr. Holmes remarked.

  The Reasoning Machine propped itself on its elbows and gave a bark of laughter. “It’s you who’ll regret it, Mycroft, when I’ve told them what you’ve done.”

  The voice—wild, half-hysterical—was as far from its previous expressionless tones as possible, putting it beyond all doubt that Mr. Holmes had indeed succeeded in introducing the Illogic Engine into his Reasoning Machine.

  Watson unbuckled the straps binding the automaton to the table and helped it to sit on the edge, where it hunched with the sheet clutched around its shoulders, gulping like a frightened child. The doctor laid a soothing hand on its arm, whereupon it buried its face in the astonished man’s shoulder with a piteous wail.

  Tacy watched this display of unbridled emotion with wonder. The program needed calibration, of course, but there was no doubt that the Illogic Engine worked more or less as she and Sir Arthur had envisioned. Yet, seeing the Reasoning Machine now—distressed, disheveled, and desperate—Tacy could not think of it as a made thing, subject only to the laws of mechanics, but as a living, feeling, suffering fellow-creature.

  “I fear my Reasoning Machine is not nearly as reasonable as he was before the introduction of your Illogic Engine,” Mr. Holmes observed dryly.

  “I warned you it hadn’t been tested in a working automaton.” Sir Arthur’s tone was defensive.

  Mycroft Holmes sighed. “So you did. No, the fault is mine, for being impatient.”

  Tacy rounded upon him. “Impatient, you call it? There’s lazy you were, and irresponsible and deceitful, and—yes—cruel! Quite apart from what you have done to that poor creature by there, there’s you tricking poor Swindon into thinking you were his friend, with your darts and your beer and your good fellowship. Then, to abuse his hospitality so! Can you deny that you took advantage of his invitation to dine with him so that you might take wax impressions of the house keys? The poor man is all but prostrate with shame.”

  The inventor shrugged his massive shoulders. “There is no shame in succumbing to a superior intelligence.”

  “And that diabolical whistle you made!” Tacy went on. “Not only did it disable the guard mechanicals, but it froze every mainspring in the house. How could you know it would not destroy the Illogic Engine as well?”

  Mr. Holmes eyed her with reluctant respect. “So you know about my whistle, do you? It was a risk, but not a great one. A very little investigation informed me that Sir Arthur procured the springs for the Engine from Messires Baume et Gaulitet. Their alloys, I have reason to know, are particularly resistant to sonic influence. Have you any more crimes to task me with?”

  Really, the arrogance of the man was almost past comprehension. “What say you to the charges of theft and kidnapping? What,” she said, “of murder?”

  “Murder?” For the first time, Mycroft Holmes seemed to be at a loss. Tacy knew a moment of triumph.

  “What have you done with Amos Gotobed? Never think to deny it, Mr. Holmes. Having arranged his escape to give the police a convenient red herring to chase, you needed to put him out of the way, in case of blackmail. What surer way than to kill him?”

  Holmes’s look of bewilderment gave way to one of pure delight. “Well done, Miss Gof! Now I recognize the intelligence behind the elegance of the Illogic Engine’s mathematics.” He smiled at her like a mastiff confronted with an angry kitten. “All’s fair in love and invention. There was no real harm done by my little deceptions, and perhaps much good. For instance, you may set your mind at rest over the dangerous Mr. Gotobed. I had him conveyed directly from prison to a ship bound for the Antipodes.”

  Tacy was unmollified. “No harm! What of Angharad?”

  Mr. Holmes’s pale gaze darted, as if compelled, towards the roof beams. Tacy followed it to Angharad, who was perched gauzily among the rafters, dangling her bare, bloody feet like a small child.

  “Angharad!” she exclaimed, relieved.

  Sir Arthur brightened. “Am I to understand that Angharad is present? I am extremely relieved to hear it.” He peered around him. “You hear that, Angharad? I am very pleased!”

  “Would someone,” Dr. Watson said plaintively, “have the goodness to tell me what is happening?”

  Angharad drifted down to the workshop floor, eyeing the doctor with disfavor. “I do not believe I have been introduced to this gentleman,” she announced.

  “You know very well he can’t hear you, Angharad,” Tacy said crossly. “Dr. Watson. May I present to you the ghost of Sir Arthur’s ancestress, Mistress Angharad Cwmlech? In front of you, she is,” she added as he stared about him, “and a little to the left.”

  Obediently, Dr. Watson nodded at what he clearly perceived as empty air. “Your servant, ma’am.”

  The Great Detective lifted his head. “I remember,” he exclaimed joyfully. “It was before I began to be interested in things, but I do remember. There was an automaton here—a clumsy, ugly, awkward thing with a voice like a cheap music box. It cursed at Mycroft in Welsh and then it went still and they couldn’t make it go again. It had quite broken down. Mycroft was most distressed.”

  Tacy looked from the inventor’s rigid countenance to Angharad. “Do you mean to tell me, then, that he can hear you?”

  “See me, too,” Angharad said. “His ghost I am now, apparently. Got more than he bargained for, look you, when he tried to kidnap me. Oh, he meant well, in his way. Offered me a new body, he did, perfectly and everlastingly beautiful. For what purpose, I know not—and my firm opinion it is that he does not know either.”

  Holmes’s face might have been carved of pink marble.

  “I told him what he might do with his body,” she went on. “If I am to be some man’s chattel, I would sooner it were my great-nephew owned me than yon coc oen. Quite heated, I became—too heated, I fear. One moment, I was scolding that pig-headed tub of lard and the next, I was as you see me now.”

  Her filmy bosom rose in a breathless sigh. “Seventeen years of life I had, with my mam after me day and night to mind my needle and my manners. Then there was the war, and the Roundheads and their rifles sentencing me to two centuries of watching Cwmlechs go about their tedious affairs—in my nightdress, look you, with no hope of a change nor anyone to talk to. And if my mam’s rules of ladyhood were burdensome, then those binding a ghost to its curse were more burdensome still. Poor as it was, young Arthur’s automaton gave me the only freedom I’ve ever tasted.”

  At this pitiful speech, Mr. Holmes abandoned his pretense of deafness. “My dear lady!” he protested. “My fondest wish is to make a body worthy of you. You may design it yourself, if you wish, down to the smallest detail.”

  “Ha!” Angharad was scornful. “Very well that would be, were that body not your property in law to be turned on and off at your will, displayed, sold, or loaned to an institution, like any other machine.”

  “Never in the world,” the inventor cried. “You have my word.”

  “The word of a scoundrel and a knave!”

  Mr. Holmes pulled himself up to his full considerable height. “
How if I see to it that you are granted full personhood under the law? Would you accept a new body, then?”

  “I would consider of it,” Angharad said with dignity.

  “Now that is what I call a handsome offer!” Sir Arthur exclaimed.

  Tacy remembered that she was still angry with him. “And I suppose you knew nothing of any of this?”

  “My dear girl!” Sir Arthur was indignant. “Of course not! The carriage broke down some way from Berkshire House, so I left James to see to it and hailed a hackney, which drove us here over my strenuous objections. I promise you, I was as distressed as you to discover that Mr. Holmes had engineered the whole.”

  “Which is why,” Tacy observed acidly, “I found you preparing to help him dismember the poor Reasoning Machine.”

  Sir Arthur raised his thumb to his mouth and nibbled at the nail. “I cannot deny that appearances are against me,” he said after a moment. “At first I was indignant, and refused to answer a single question Mr. Holmes put to me. Then Angharad’s automaton broke down and I felt obliged to do what I could to fix it—for Angharad’s sake, of course. But between working over her together, and his distress when all our efforts failed, and the Reasoning Machine’s reaction to the installation of the Illogic Engine—well, one thing led to another.”

  “I see,” Tacy said. And she did. Sir Arthur lived to experiment. For the sake of an untested theory, he would flout convention, bend laws, and fly in the face of common sense. It was this spirit of experimentation that had led him to hire the sixteen-year-old daughter of a blacksmith as his housekeeper, to have her educated and to work with her as a colleague and an equal. It was one of the things she loved in him. “You thought it would be interesting.”

  Sir Arthur nodded.

  “And the experiment did not work quite as you expected.”

  “It did not.” Mr. Holmes, who had been observing all this time, spoke with some feeling.

  “Well, you see for yourself.” Angharad indicated the Reasoning Machine, who was following the conversation with a painful intensity. “All full of emotions, the poor creature is, and not a notion what to do with them—like a baby, really. Only more clever. The things he called poor Mycroft!”

  “Just so,” said the inventor. “It is quite unable to control its emotions. After some discussion, Sir Arthur agreed to help me remove the Engine until we could design a better model.”

  “Mr. Holmes,” Sir Arthur added eagerly, “has some very sound ideas about regulation and control, Tacy. It is his opinion that—”

  “No!” The Reasoning Machine’s voice quivered with terror. “I don’t want to be regulated and controlled! They’re my emotions, and you can’t take them away from me!” He clutched at Dr. Watson’s arm. “You won’t let them take my feelings away, will you?”

  The doctor looked alarmed. “My dear chap! Of course it is wrong to deny you your emotions, even temporarily. Yet you must know I have no power to stop Mr. Holmes, should he decide to do so.”

  “You have a revolver!” the automaton cried. “Threaten him with it, and we will make our escape into the stews of London and live by my wits and your strong arm.” A smile blossomed on his lean face. “I shall be the Emperor of Crime, and you shall be my consort!”

  His words were met by an astonished silence, broken by Mycroft Holmes’s rich laughter.

  Her temper in shreds, Tacy turned upon him. “The poor creature has a right to his feelings, look you. Though you forced them upon him, now that he has them, a crime it would be to remove them because you find them inconvenient.”

  Which, she realized in the silence that followed, could well be said of her feelings as well. Having discovered that she loved Arthur, she could not un-know it again. Nor would she wish to, aware though she was that such an unequal affection must come to nothing. A baronet, even a Welsh baronet, was unlikely to marry a blacksmith’s daughter, particularly if she was his apprentice. Particularly if he regarded her in the light of a younger sister. There was nothing for it but to go home to Mam and think how a clever spinster might keep herself. A schoolmistress, perhaps, or a mechanic’s secretary. She felt very low indeed.

  The Reasoning Machine’s pale gaze flicked from her to Sir Arthur. “I do not entirely understand what is happening. But I have a strong feeling that Sir Arthur should kiss Miss Gof without delay.”

  Tacy gave a little mew and covered her blazing face with her hands.

  “Oh,” Arthur said. And then, “Oh! Of course,” and pulled her awkwardly to him.

  Feeling his arms around her and his lips on her hair, Tacy lifted her face, clutched the bib of his apron, and pulled his mouth down to meet hers.

  Someone, possibly Dr. Watson, exclaimed “I say!” in a startled tone. She disengaged herself reluctantly.

  The Reasoning Machine was wistful. “I wish I had someone to love, too, and a home, and a proper name, like a real person. Jabez would be nice. Or Algernon. Algernon Holmes.” He turned to the doctor. “What do you say?”

  Watson gave him a wary smile. “I’ll give it some thought, old chap. But first things first.” He turned his clear brown gaze on the inventor. “You will let him keep his emotions, will you not?”

  The big man cast up his hands in defeat. “I will. He must learn to control them, however—he’s all but useless as he is.” He considered Watson. “Do you think you could undertake to teach him?”

  The Machine turned a radiant countenance to the doctor. “The very thing! Oh, do say you will!”

  “I…”

  “It is settled, then,” said Holmes. “In his current state, London is likely to be too much for him. I have a cottage in Sussex, near Bognor Regis, quite sequestered from the world. You shall take him there.” He divested himself of his apron and gauntlets. In his shirtsleeves, with his braces showing, he seemed far less formidable, almost human. He fixed Watson with a measuring eye. “Have you any interest in mechanical engineering?”

  Dr. Watson looked startled. “Why, yes. Considerable interest.”

  “Excellent. I shall give you a grounding in basic maintenance before you go.”

  “And I, myself, shall teach you everything else,” the Machine broke in happily. “I know a great deal about mechanical engineering. Do you think there will be bees, Watson? I have a great desire to observe the communal intelligence of bees. Oh, what fun we shall have!”

  Here he showed every sign of throwing his arms around Watson and serving him as Tacy had served Sir Arthur. Watson gently deflected the embrace without absolutely spurning it.

  Sir Arthur possessed himself of Tacy’s hand. “I think,” he said, “that I should like to go home now.”

  But the dawn of reciprocal love had not entirely robbed Tacy of her common sense. “One more question there is to be settled, before we make an end,” she said, turning to Mr. Holmes. “You have our prototype and all our notes. Without them, we can neither refine our work, nor present it to the Royal Society, nor apply for a patent. In short, it will be as if the Illogic Engine was never invented. Unless, perhaps, you intend to present it as your own work?”

  The inventor looked shocked. “I may be a thief, Miss Gof, but I am not a scoundrel.” He rubbed his face with his well-kept hands. “Well. It seems we have a great deal still to discuss. Doctor, would you be so good as to walk through that door behind you and put the kettle on the hob? I think we could all use a cup of tea.”

  April 1882

  On a bright, chilly spring morning, Sir Arthur and Lady Cwmlech sat at breakfast in the cozy morning room of their house on Curzon Street. Sir Arthur was reading a book he had propped up against the saltcellar and absently dripping egg over his waistcoat. Lady Cwmlech, a plate of toast and marmalade at her elbow, was poring over the flimsy sheets of the popular journal, the Thames-Side Monthly.

  Turning over a page, she uttered an excited squeak. “Here it is at last, Arthur!”

  Sir Arthur looked up from his book, pale eyes bleary behind his spectacles. The patent application
for the Illogic Engine had kept him up half the night. Bad as a new baby, Tacy thought, and smiled. He smiled back wanly. “Here is what, my love?”

  “John’s account of the Bootlace Murders. Never tell me you’ve forgotten! Five cobblers strangled with bootlaces and laid out on their benches all neat and tidy, and the police as baffled as sheep at a gate. Last spring it was, just after the wedding.”

  “After the wedding,” Sir Arthur said, “I had more important things to think of than deceased cobblers.” He gave Tacy a grin that brought the blood to her cheeks.

  “Of course, my dear. But John wrote us about it, remember? Their first case after the move to Baker Street, and so proud he was of how well Sherlock and the police dealt together, after that unfortunate misunderstanding about the purloined letter.”

  “Damned silly name, Sherlock,” Sir Arthur observed.

  “No sillier than Mycroft, when all’s said and done. None of our concern, in any case.” She gave him a wifely look. “Will I read it to you, then, while you wipe the egg off your waistcoat?”

  Sir Arthur stared down at the congealed yolk festooning his chest. “Oh, dear,” he sighed. “Tacy, do you think…?”

  Dipping her napkin in her husband’s tea, Tacy dealt with the waistcoat, then rang for Swindon, who bore off the spoiled napery.

  “I’m sorry, my love.” Sir Arthur said. “I’ve forgotten what you were saying.”

  “The Bootlace Murders.”

  “Ah. The Bootlace Murders. I am all attention. Who did the Great Detective deduce had done ’em?”

  “There’s pity,” Tacy said severely, “to set aside all John’s hard work in unfolding the mystery step-by-step, with all the characters of the shoemaker’s wife and Inspector Gregson and the man with the limp drawn as clear as life. Furthermore,” she went on, “we are to dine with them tonight, before the concert. Churlish, it would be, not to mention his literary debut.”

  Sir Arthur shook his head. “I dare not, dearest. The patent application—”