The Perils of Sherlock Holmes

by Loren D. Estleman

“You are not alone, but the statistics I’ve compiled argue against that conclusion. When I publish them, comparing shifts in criminal behaviour with changes in climate, the public will press the meteorological community to improve its atmospheric predictions, which if the campaign succeeds will prove a barometer for mayhem as well, infinitely superior to fancies concerning lunar gravity.

  “Think of it, Watson!” he exclaimed. “A scientific plan for the prevention of crime. Here is Utopia indeed, without the pestiferous politics.”

  “But, Holmes,” said I, “would that not also eliminate the necessity for your services as a detective?”

  “Beyond doubt. It is the responsibility of any sincere researcher to answer all questions and therefore eliminate his profession.”

  I tried to contemplate a world with no use for Sherlock Holmes, but it all seemed like the novels of Monsieur Verne.

  In the silence of our separate reveries we turned down Marylebone Lane. There my companion halted abruptly and grasped my arm in an oaken grip.

  “Hullo, Watson! There is your cheery weather at its devil’s work now.”

  We had stopped before a grey stone building of nondescript aspect, so much so that I was unaware of having seen it previously, despite countless excursions in that neighbourhood. It bore a tarnished plaque beside its entrance, identifying it as the headquarters of the British Retrospective Society, an organisation of which I had not heard. At the base of the stone steps leading up to the door, which yawned open, a pair of strangers were engaged in strenuous fisticuffs.

  It was a sight common among the rough customers who prowled the sordid streets and alleys of the East End, but rare in our vicinity, and given the appearance of the combatants, sufficiently outside the ordinary to have drawn a small crowd.

  The pugilists were attired as gentlemen, in frock coats and cravats, but there was little of the Marquess of Queensbury in the way they conducted their contest. As we watched, one man bit the wrist of the other, evidently attempting to persuade him to release the leather document case clamped in that hand. Blood trickled, but the portfolio remained in his desperate grip.

  The biter was tall, black-bearded, and burly, tanned deep brown from prolonged exposure to a climate far less temperate than England’s. The man holding the case, smaller and thin as a willow branch, was white-haired and sickly pale; a thick pair of rimless pince-nez swung free from a black ribbon clipped to a lapel.

  All about them the street was littered with loose papers; I noted, almost humourously, that the efforts of the smaller man to defend himself were hampered by his unwillingness to give up his case, which he seemed unaware had tipped out all its contents in the struggle.

  There was, however, nothing to laugh at in that ugly display. They punched, they grappled, they clawed at and clung to each other, and whilst it was obvious that the smaller man was losing the battle, it was equally evident that he would not give up even at the point of being beaten to death. Inexpertly he tried to fend off the blows raining upon him from a stronger and more experienced fighter, grimly determined to destroy him.

  A fist the size of a Christmas ham came into contact with the smaller man’s chin with a crack such as a billiard-cue makes upon the break. The recipient’s eyes rolled over white and his knees buckled.

  At this point, sensing victory, a fair man would have backed away. Instead, the big man stepped in closer and drew back his other fist for a blow that had death written all over it.

  “Hold, sir! The fight is ended.” Emphasising his point, Holmes laid his stick across that cocked arm.

  Enraged by this interruption, the big man spun upon the stranger. Simultaneously the smaller man collapsed. I moved in swiftly to catch him before his head struck the pavement. He sagged heavily in my embrace.

  “What affair is it of yours?” demanded the well-dressed ruffian, grasping Holmes’s stick with his other hand.

  “Murder is every man’s affair,” said he, as with a small but sudden exertion of his right hand he twisted the stick by its knob and with it the big man’s wrist. In almost the same motion, he jabbed with his left, swept up his right elbow, snapping shut the fellow’s jaws, and as the big man’s face went slack stepped away to allow him room to fall. This he did, and no man came forwards to interrupt his descent.

  The crowd broke into astonished applause.

  Holmes ignored the accolade. “Is he badly injured?”

  “I cannot say until I have examined him.” Gently I lowered the smaller man to the ground.

  Raising his stick, Holmes hailed a passing cab.

  Within minutes we were back in Holmes’s rooms, where my patient, deposited on the sofa, heaved a great sigh when I removed his collar, but had not yet regained his senses. I bathed his cheeks and forehead with cool water from a basin and, supporting his head with one hand, poured a small portion of restorative brandy between his parted lips. They were cracked and bleeding. I daubed at them with a damp cloth. He had a livid swelling above one eye and a bruise on his chin, but no bones were broken, and it was my prognosis that he would recover soon.

  Holmes watched these procedures with one hand in his pocket and the other fingering the bowl of his clay pipe. He appeared not so much concerned with the patient’s health as impatient to hear his story.

  Suddenly the man’s eyes opened wide and he made a motion to sit up. I checked it by laying a palm against his chest.

  “My papers!” he said weakly. “Where are they?”

  “Easy, my man,” said I. “You’ve suffered a severe beating. You must lie still and rest.”

  “What good will that do without my life’s work? I must have my papers!”

  Holmes came forwards bearing the leather document case, no longer empty now but crammed near to bursting. It was a sturdy construction of brown calfskin that had once been fine, but which through age and misuse had grown shabby, stained, faded, and splitting at the seams.

  “I trust everything is here,” said Holmes. “I gathered every sheet I could find, but your condition seemed grave, and time was of the essence.”

  I doubt the man on the sofa heard the words. He’d no sooner laid eyes on the case than he shoved aside my staying hand and snatched the item from Holmes’s grasp. In a trice he had the latch undone and was rummaging inside with both hands.

  Little could be made of his muttering as he scanned each crumpled page through the pince-nez clutched in his fingers: I took it he was reading to himself in post-classical Latin. Certainly it was not the medical variety, as I understood not a word.

  Holmes observed him throughout, as closely as the man was studying his precious sheets. So involved was he in concentration, the detective appeared not to notice that his pipe had gone out.

  Presently our visitor fell back with a long, contented sigh, enfolding his case in both arms. He might have been its mother, and the case her child, snatched from beneath the wheels of a runaway carriage.

  “Thank the Lord,” said he, over and over. “Thanks be to the Lord.”

  “I should thank Him for more than the return of your papers,” said I. “That brute we left in the gutter intended you should never leave it, except in a hearse.”

  He opened his eyes. “Oh, Ridpath is no brute. He’s rigid in his convictions, but that’s hardly uncommon. Had he lived during the Renaissance, he’d have asked Columbus if he had a pleasant voyage, and that would be the end of the matter. He combines the courage of David with the imagination of a postal clerk.”

  “Whereas you, Dr. H. Quicksilver Carlyle, are a man of both valour and vision.”

  “You flatter me, sir; though I may say in all humility that I have had my moments. I hope you will forgive me if I do not recall the circumstances of our introduction. That last blow must have rattled my medulla.”

  “No apology is necessary, Doctor. Since we have not met before this moment, it follows that we have not exchanged names.”

  A pair of thin white eyebrows lifted. “How, then, did you identify me? My nam
e is not in these papers.”

  “Oh, but it is. I confess that I have a weakness for documents—a casualty of both our professions—and must read any that cross my path. Whilst retrieving the material that had strayed from your case, I chanced to note that they were written upon in Old English, albeit in a decidedly modern hand—and in pencil, which is an implement unknown in Beowulf’s time.

  “A transcription, then, scribbled—not in haste, which encourages slovenliness, but swiftly and with confidence—by one sufficiently familiar with that archaic and difficult tongue to scorn hesitation. Incidentally, it is my impression that those texts I paused to examine were something on the order of a chant or incantation. Mind you, I don’t insist upon it. My own scholarship in the area is confined to crimes committed in pre-Norman England.”

  Holmes drew on his pipe, saw the fire had gone out, and relit it before continuing.

  “As I returned the documents to their case, I noted that the flap bore the initials H.Q.C.: important information, which I placed in storage to be reclaimed later. All these observations took place in the time it took to rescue the papers and for the cab I’d hailed to come to a stop. More recently, during the good doctor’s examination, I turned for information to a conceit of mine, the keeping of commonplace books into which I place all curious items that come my way. Under H—well, I shan’t bother you with Hugh Capper, master of the doomed frigate H.M.S. Delores, or Henry Conk-Singleton, the forger. I was satisfied that you were neither. Elimination brought me at length to one name only.”

  Holmes picked up a book he’d left lying open in his chair, but he did not recite from it immediately.

  “The Times was most amused by the disagreement between you and your colleague, Junius Ridpath, regarding the significance of excavations in the south of England. You read a paper to the British Retrospective Society expressing the opinion that the magical practices of Druidism, previously thought to have been introduced to the ancient Celts around 400 B.C., may in fact reach as far back as the New Stone Age, and represent the earliest religion known to man. Mr. Ridpath, currently serving as president of the British Retrospective Society, cleaves to the earlier assumption. I quote:

  “‘Dr. Carlyle has the qualifications of a master phrenologist. The researches of the great Copernicus would have been as nothing to Carlyle’s claims that the sun revolves round the earth, on evidence discovered as providentially, and as mysteriously without supervision, as the scraps and shoddy he has placed before this body. Every quarter century or so, the science of antiquities must deal with this class of pest.’”

  Holmes snapped shut the book. “It is the old story,” he said. “The boor in the lecture-hall becomes a bully in the street. I was strongly inclined towards my identification of my friend’s newest patient, and was gratified, when you mentioned Ridpath, to confirm it.”

  “A tour-de-force!” said I.

  “A crass indulgence. I could simply have waited for Dr. Carlyle to come round and introduce himself, and spared the long-winded explanation of my methods.”

  “I should not have missed it for the bones of King Arthur.” The eyes behind the archaeologist’s spectacles glittered. “If you will permit me, I am not without resources of my own. You are, beyond doubt, Mr. Sherlock Holmes; and you, sir, are Dr. Watson, without whose pen I could not have connected the detection to the detective.”

  Holmes coloured slightly, and I laughed despite myself.

  He shrugged then. “After all, you came to your misfortune just round the corner from Baker Street. How many detectives share the neighbourhood?”

  “Surely the city is large enough to contain two close observers of evidence,” said I, in the spirit of mollification.

  Carlyle did not linger upon the subject, but became instantly serious.

  “As a matter of fact, it was Ridpath’s stand which compelled me to visit the Society once again, this time armed with all my notes. I encountered him in the foyer, hoping to challenge him to a formal debate before the membership. Instead, my latest findings threw him into a rage. He hurled me down the front steps, and followed me down with the intent of thrashing me.

  “I fear you must supply the rest,” he added. “I remember a great bursting light, such as the Aztecs of Mexico spoke of after days of ceremonial fasting, and then I can recall nothing until I awoke in this room.”

  “I shall waive the details and report that it will be a spell before Mr. Ridpath throws any more archaeologists down any more steps,” said Holmes. “Your latest findings must have been inflammatory indeed.”

  “To some, perhaps; enlightening to others. I feel I can tell you, Mr. Holmes, that the combined intelligence of these papers and what I have seen with my own eyes will strip the veil from everything we do not know about ourselves and our civilisation.”

  Carlyle spoke in a quavering whisper. His eyes, naturally watery and somewhat protuberant, were bright as from fever. The tip of his short thin nose twitched like a rabbit’s.

  Holmes said, “Continue, but I beg of you to be brief.”

  Shy as he was, our guest’s smile bordered upon sardonic. “In that case, I shall pass over the subject of everything we do not know.”

  Despite my protest, he swung his feet to the floor and, clutching his precious satchel in his lap, began the remarkable narrative I here relate.

  “With the kind permission of Sir Cecil Chubb, who owns the property, I have been excavating among the ruins on the great Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. Do you know the place, Mr. Holmes?”

  “Not personally. I am aware that Stonehenge stands there.”

  “Precisely. Stonehenge. Pre-eminent among the megalithic monuments that tell us so much, and yet so very little, about our prehistoric ancestors. The great stones stand within a circular depression three hundred feet in diameter, with a broad roadway, inestimably ancient, leading up to it between steep embankments. The arrangement of the stones is orderly, the outermost series forming a circle enclosing a smaller circle, which in turn encloses a horseshoe.”

  As he spoke, Carlyle shifted his case onto the sofa beside him and cupped his hands, drawing an imaginary diagram of the concentric circles and half-circle. His palms, I noted, were thick with callus, unusual in a bookish scholar, but quite in keeping with his enthusiasm for his chosen field of study. Plainly he had not been able to resist shoveling dirt alongside his hired team of excavators.

  “The innermost series, inside the horseshoe, will require further digging to reveal its shape. In my opinion, based upon my knowledge of the singular race that built it, it will resemble an egg. The stones are massive, suggesting both a great deal of sustained labour and at least a primitive understanding of engineering principles often attributed to Archimedes. To some of my colleagues, these are heresies, Mr. Holmes. They prefer their Greeks and Romans noble, their Stone Age artisans brutish and grunting. But I am satisfied as to my conclusions.”

  “I understand, Doctor. You are a lone voice in a wilderness peopled with Lestrades.”

  The sardonic smile flickered briefly. “Yes. I have read Dr. Watson’s writings, and your assessment of the Inspector is known to me. I heartily agree with the comparison.

  “Learned opinions vary regarding the construction’s original purpose,” he continued. “Some believe it is a combination sundial and calendar, tracking the hours of the day and the seasons of the year. Others maintain it is a monument to warriors slain in the defense of England against the Germanic invaders Hengist and Horsa. Still others hold it to be the ruins of a Roman temple.

  “They are all mistaken,” he concluded.

  “And your proof?” enquired Holmes.

  Carlyle patted his case.

  “It is all here; the work of a lifetime. Old English manuscripts translated from Latin inscriptions based upon paintings found in caves as far away as Cornwall, their original artists gone to dust a thousand years before Christ. You think me less than hearty based upon my performance round the corner, yet I have crawled down bu
rrows a ferret would shy from, shouted at mulish civil servants, and wrested precious papers physically from the clutches of illiterate housekeepers determined to use them to start fires. The science of antiquities is a savage business. More vigourous men than I have abandoned it for gentler pursuits. You may, in the light of this awareness, pardon my agitation when I announce that I, Hercules Quicksilver Carlyle, alone know the secret of Stonehenge.”

  I stifled a chuckle. I knew little about ancient England and cared less, but it amused me to think that this sallow and underfed ascetic had gone through life bearing the name Hercules.

  In his concentration, Holmes appeared unmoved by my breach of manners.

  “I hold false modesty and empty braggadocio in equal contempt,” he told Carlyle, “and it’s clear you’re guilty of neither. It is wise, however, to consider one’s audience first. Is this statement what led to your thrashing?”

  “Yes. For all his reputation as an adventurer—he explored the Nile with Burton, and dove into Loch Ness in search of its Monster— Ridpath is a slave to convention. Give him a rhinoceros in full charge and he is happy. Speak to him of magic and mysticism and you will find in him no friend.”

  “Nor in me. I declare this world sufficiently challenging. I require no others.”

  Carlyle was undaunted. He leaned forwards, his eyes tiny suns.

  “What if I were to tell you, Mr. Holmes, that magic existed in this very world you find so challenging, as far back as the dawn of man?”

  “I should suggest you wait for the sun to rise higher, and your vision to improve.”

  “And what if I were to tell you that it exists still, here among our steam engines and electric dynamos?”

  “I should request proof.”

  “What if I should withhold it?”

  “I should demand it.” Holmes traded his clay for his disputatious cherrywood and stuffed it with shag. “Cave paintings are absorbing relics, Doctor, but man is a simple creature, easily distracted. I would not place great faith in the records he has left behind. Even a down-to-earth fellow like Watson has known his flights of fancy. He publishes them upon a regular basis.”