The Perils of Sherlock Holmes

by Loren D. Estleman

  I could divine no more detail than this, as very soon we pulled up before a gloomy old pile which I suspected had shown no great ceremony in its construction under George III, and to which the lapse of nearly a century and a half had brought little in the way of dignity or character. It seemed a most unlikely shelter for the institution Holmes had described.

  Lord Chislehurst, to whom we were shown by a distracted young clerk, ameliorated to a great extent this disappointing impression. Well along in his fifties, he had yet a youthful abundance of fair hair, with but a trace of grey in the side whiskers, and the gracefully swelling abdomen that instilled confidence in those who would trust their fortunes to the care of one so well fed, contained in a grey waistcoat and black frock coat. His broad face was flushed and his manner cordial as he exhorted us to make ourselves comfortable in a pair of deep leather chairs facing his great desk. I noticed as he made his way round to his own seat that he walked with a pronounced limp.

  “I am doubly honoured, Dr. Watson, to welcome you to my place of business,” said he, leaning back and threading his fingers together across his middle. “I have read your published accounts of Mr. Holmes’s cases with a great deal of interest. As a writer, you may be intrigued to learn that my father toiled for many years as a clerk in the counting-house you came through just now.”

  “You have done well for yourself,” I said truthfully.

  “So my father might say. Despite the hardship, he was a jovial man, and would laugh long and loud to see his youngest child making free with the cigars in this office.” He helped himself to one from a cherrywood box upon the desk and proffered the rest, but we declined.

  “Hardship?” prompted Holmes.

  “The former owner was a fierce old ogre in his time, and pinched the halfpenny till it shrieked. Changed quite a bit in his last years, though, I’ll be bound; saw the light, I suspect, as Judgement neared. His generosity to his employees after that made it possible for Father to arrange an operation that saved my life. I was a sickly child—a cripple, in fact. Unfortunately, the old banker overdid himself in the largesse department, and wound up sacrificing those same sound business principles that made him wealthy. His fortunes declined even as mine ascended. He died in debt, and I acquired the firm the very week I entered the Peerage.”

  Holmes lit a cigarette. “An inspiring story, Your Lordship. Your letter—”

  “The tea is not always sweet,” he interrupted. “I had hoped to move the offices to more suitable quarters down the street next spring, but this South African mess has got all our foreign securities tied up. Against my better judgement, I have been forced to cancel this year’s employee gratuities.”

  “Your letter mentioned a ghost.”

  “Three ghosts, Mr. Holmes. As if one were not sufficient.” Our host’s genial smile had vanished. “I have been visited by them the past two nights, and I must say it’s getting to be a dashed nuisance.”

  “What happened the first night?”

  “I was not greatly alarumed by it, thinking the business a bad dream caused by exhaustion and overindulgence. That day had been long and frustrating, beginning with more bad news from Africa in the Times, and complicated by a discrepancy in the accounts totalling forty-two pounds, which required that the transactions of the entire week be gone over with a weather eye by everyone on the staff. When the error was finally discovered and the correction made, the hour was well past seven. As is my wont, I stopped at the tavern round the corner on my way home, where I confess I had rather more than my customary tot of sherry. My wife, recognising my condition at the door, put me to bed straightaway.

  “I slept as one dead until the stroke of one, at which time I awoke, or thought I awoke, with the realisation that I was not alone in my chamber.”

  “One moment,” interrupted Holmes. “You do not share sleeping quarters with your wife?”

  “Not since the early months of our marriage. I often sleep fitfully, with much tossing and muttering, and my wife is a light sleeper. I prefer not to disturb her. Is it significant?”

  “Perhaps not. Please proceed.”

  “‘Who is there?’ I asked groggily; for I was aware of a shimmering paleness in a corner of the room that was usually dark, as of a shaft of moonlight reflecting off a human face.

  “‘The Ghost of Christmas Past,’ came the reply. The voice was most solemn but youthful, and very much of this earth.

  “‘Whose past?’ I demanded. ‘Who let you in?’”

  “‘Your past,’ said the shade; and then some rot about coming along with him.”

  Holmes, settled deep in his chair with his lower limbs stretched in front of him and his eyes closed, said nothing, listening. His cigarette smoked between his fingers. As for myself, I felt my brow wrinkling. The narrative had begun to sound familiar.

  “The rest is quite personal,” the earl continued. “Vivid memories of my childhood, Christmas dinner with my mother and father and my brother Peter and my sister Martha, and Father going on about a goose, and what-have-you. Obviously I was dreaming, but I had the distinct impression of having travelled a great distance, and that I was peeping at all this as through a window, with the Ghost of Christmas Past standing at my elbow. It was all very strange, but nice, and sad as well. My parents are dead, my sister married and gone to America, and my brother and I have not spoken in years. We quarrelled over our meagre inheritance. I suppose it is not unusual to feel wistful over the happier days of youth. Still, it was an odd coincidence.”

  Holmes opened his eyes. “How was it a coincidence?”

  “I had spent much of that trying day shut up with Richard, my chief clerk, going over the accounts. When at length the discrepancy I mentioned was identified and corrected, it seemed natural to invite him to join me in a glass of sherry at the tavern. He accepted, and we whiled away a convivial evening reminiscing about Christmasses old and new. So it seems odd that I should dream about the very same thing that night.”

  “Not at all, Your Lordship,” I put in. “Man is a suggestible creature. It would be far more unusual to dream about something that was not in one’s mind recently.”

  “I think there is something in what you say, Doctor. Certainly it would help to explain the second part of my dream.” The Earl lit a fresh cigar, apparently forgetting the one he had left smouldering only half-smoked in the tray on his desk. “It seems I returned to my bed, for again the clock struck one and I found myself as I had previously, staring at a phosphorescence in the corner and asking what was there.

  “‘The Ghost of Christmas Present,’ responded a most remarkable voice, jolly and full of timbre, as of a man in the fullness of his middle years. Just this, and again the summons to come along.

  “Now we were standing outside the window of a tiny flat in the City, witnessing what appeared to be a serious row between a young husband and his wife over money; something about not having sufficient funds to settle their bills, let alone celebrate the holiday. At the tavern, Richard had told me of a number of financial setbacks they had suffered because of unforeseen emergencies, but I had not perceived how serious the situation was until that moment. It appeared to threaten their union.”

  “Had you met his wife?” Holmes asked.

  “I have not had that pleasure. However, he keeps a photographic portrait of her at his desk. She is most comely.”

  “Women generally are, in photographs. What happened when the clock again struck one?”

  Lord Chislehurst permitted himself an arid smile. “I should have been disappointed had you not seen the pattern. This phantom, who indicated through gestures that he was the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, was the most unsettling of all, and the picture he showed me of some future Yuletide was bleak and hideous. I saw Richard’s home broken, his wife, stigmatised by divorce, forced to make her living from the streets, even as Richard pursued a bitter and lonely existence as an unloved and aging bachelor. Worse, I saw my own neglected grave. Evidently I had gone to it without o
bsequy, my harsh and penurious business practices having ruined lives and left none to mourn my passing.” He shuddered.

  Holmes finished his cigarette. “In your waking moments, My Lord, are you given to dwelling morbidly upon the subject of your future demise?”

  “Never. I regard it as an inevitability, which to brood over is to squander what little life we have. This was what I told Lady Chislehurst when she brought up the subject of my last will and testament.”

  “Indeed?” Holmes lifted his brows. “Did this discussion take place before or after your dream?”

  “Before. That very night, in fact. When I was late coming home from the tavern, she entertained various concerns over what might have befallen me, as wives will. When I arrived at last, she expressed relief, then scolded me as I was preparing to retire that I should be more careful, as the streets are not safe at night for a man not in full possession of his wits, and that if I insisted upon placing myself in jeopardy I should make arrangements for the division of my estate before some footpad separates me from my watch and my life.”

  “A practical woman.”

  “Very much so. It is the quality which drew my attention to her in the first place. I met her when she came to work for me as a typist. Her suggestions for the improvement of the firm were inspired, and as she was of good family I soon realised that she was the woman to bring order to my existence away from the office. We were married within a year. From time to time, when the firm is shorthanded due to illness or personal emergency among the staff, she still comes in to help out.”

  “I assume she works well with Richard.”

  “They make an ideal team. Often I have seen them in conference, with many nods and expressions of agreement. But what has this to do with my ghosts?”

  “Probably nothing. Perhaps everything. Let us return to this will. Were you persuaded to make it out?”

  “My solicitor was in this morning. I signed the documents and Richard witnessed my signature. My wife is chief beneficiary, and Richard is executor; he is a reliable man, and the fee will come in handy should his financial difficulties continue.”

  “I commend Your Lordship upon his generosity. You had the dream again last night?”

  “Yes, and I’m not certain it was a dream. I was cold sober, having gone straight home from the office without stopping at the tavern, and retired at a decent hour. A cup of tea with Lady Chislehurst before bed was my only indulgence. I shall not repeat myself, for the visitations were the same, including the redundant striking of the hour of one upon the clock, the shades of Christmasses Past, Present, and Yet to Come, and the visions which accompanied them. This time, however, it was all much more vivid. I awoke this morning with the conviction that it had all been true. And there was something else, Mr. Holmes: the condition of my bedroom slippers.”

  “Your bedroom slippers?”

  “Yes.” He leaned forwards, placing his palms upon his desk. “They were soaked through, Mr. Holmes, exactly as if I had been walking in snow the whole night.”

  This intelligence had a profound effect upon my friend. Face thrust forwards now, his eyes keen and his nostrils flaring, he said, “I must prevail upon Your Lordship to invite Dr. Watson and myself to be your guests tonight.”

  The earl frowned—less perturbed, I thought, by the inconvenience of entertaining two unexpected houseguests as by the impropriety of Holmes having made the suggestion himself. “You deem this necessary?”

  “I consider it of the utmost importance.”

  “Very well. I shall send a messenger to inform my wife.”

  “That is precisely what I must ask you not to do. No one must know that we are in residence.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Everything depends upon the outward appearance that your nightly routine remains unchanged. I assure you I am not being melodramatic when I say your life is in danger.”

  “But of what, Mr. Holmes? By whom?”

  Holmes stood, ignoring this reasonable question. “I shall need time to lay my trap. Will it be possible to ensure that Lady Chislehurst and your servants are all away from home this evening between the hours of eight and nine?”

  “That should not be difficult. Our cook will have left by then, and our maid is away visiting relatives for the holiday. I shall suggest my wife call upon her friend Mrs. Wesley down the street. She was widowed last spring and faces a lonely Christmas.”

  “Excellent. Pray inform her that you are exhausted and will probably have retired by the time she returns. Dr. Watson and I shall be watching from cover. Expect us immediately after she has gone. It is extremely important that you share none of these details with anyone, especially your clerk.”

  The earl was plainly troubled, but agreed without further questions, and provided us with directions to his London lodgings, whereupon we moved towards the door. Upon the threshold I turned and said, “I should like to ask Your Lordship a question, a personal one.”

  “I have no secrets, Doctor.”

  “Is your family name by any chance Cratchit?”

  He appeared surprised. “Why, yes, it is. I was born Timothy Cratchit. Did you read that in Brook’s?”

  “No, Your Lordship; in Dickens.”

  Lord Chislehurst scowled. “That miserable yarn-spinner! I personally have not read his invasive little story, yet I cannot escape from it. Until I entered the nobility I could go nowhere without some new acquaintance hailing me as Tiny Tim, despite having achieved my full growth, and thinking himself quite the clever fellow. I’d have the meddler in court were he still living.”

  After we had been shown out of the counting-room by Richard, who seemed a personable sort, well-groomed and -dressed within the limitations of a clerk’s salary, Holmes asked me the meaning of the last exchange.

  I was stupefied. “Surely you are familiar with Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’! Every English schoolboy has had the story force-fed to him each December since it made its appearance.”

  “I was an uncommon schoolboy, and I haven’t the faintest notion as to what you are referring.”

  Briefly, in the hansom on the way back to Baker Street, I summarised that most English of Christmas tales and its unforgettable cast of characters: Ebenezer Scrooge, the miserly, holiday-loathing banker; Bob Cratchit, his long-suffering clerk; Cratchit’s loveable, crippled younger son, Tiny Tim; and the three ghosts who visited Scrooge and brought about his conversion to the season of love and forgiveness. Holmes listened with keen interest.

  “I recall telling you once that it is a mistake to imagine that one’s brain-attic has elastic walls, and that the time will come when for every new shipment of information one accepts, another must be sacrificed,” he said when I had finished. “However, I rather think I have an uncluttered corner still, and it seems to me that literature would not be an unwise thing to deposit there. What one man can invent, another can subvert. If you and I are not careful tonight, Watson, your Mr. Dickens may well be an unwitting accomplice before the fact of murder.”

  “Whom do you suspect, and what is the motive?”

  “Chiefly, I suspect Lady Chislehurst and Richard, the clerk. Whether their alliance is amorous or strictly mercenary has yet to be determined, but I am convinced they are in it together, and that Lord Chislehurst’s estate is their object.”

  “But why the clerk? The wife is the sole beneficiary.”

  “It was he who planted the suggestion in the earl’s mind which led to his Christmas Present vision of strife in Richard’s household. Our client was not aware of his subordinate’s dire financial situation before their most timely conversation. There is nothing so effective as a little haunting, abetted by an application of strong spirits and combined with a wife’s reminder of one’s fiscal responsibilities to his family, for bringing a man to a contemplation of his mortality, and to the arrangement for the disposition of his worldly goods.”

  “Are you suggesting he was mesmerised?”

  “I suspect somet
hing even more ambitious and diabolical. You may count upon it, Watson, there is skullduggery afoot. I am reminded most acutely of that business at the Baskerville estate during the early years of our association. If there is a ghost involved here at all, it is that blackguard Stapleton’s.”

  At this point Holmes fell into a dark reverie, from which I knew from long experience he would not be drawn until the hour of our appointment with our endangered client. As we clip-clopped homeward through those streets laden with snow, the seasonal spirit was significantly absent inside that cab.

  Big Ben had just struck eight, and the resonance of its final chime was still in the air when a well-built woman in her middle years bustled out the doorway of an imposing pile not far from Threadneedle Street and started down the pavement wrapped in a heavy cloak. This, I assumed, was Lady Chislehurst; and she had not been out of sight thirty seconds when Holmes and I emerged from the shallow doorway across the street where we had stationed ourselves five minutes previously.

  Holmes did not ring the bell right away, but paced the length of the front of the building, swinging his cane in the metronomic manner he often used to measure distance. Presently he climbed the front steps with me at his heels.

  The bell was answered almost immediately by our client, whose attire of nightcap and dressing-gown assured us he had followed Holmes’s advice and convinced his wife that he was retiring. Once we were admitted to the rather dark and gloomy foyer, the detective repeated the procedure he had conducted outside, pacing the room deliberately from the left wall to the right.

  “An interesting building,” he said when he was standing before the earl once again. “James the First, is it not?”

  “James the Second, or so I was told when I acquired it from the Scrooge estate. It was a depressing old place, neglected and in disrepair. Lady Chislehurst has done much to improve it, although much remains to be done. The very first thing she did was to see to it that the hideous old door-knocker was removed. The lion’s head frightened our nieces and nephews when they came to visit.”