Holmes had talked during the meal with wit and energy. When he set himself to charm, which was not often, there was none better. Now he lit a cigarette, and said, “The danger is not at all far off, Miss Caston. Notice the clock. It lacks only half an hour to midnight. Now we approach the summit, and the peril is more close than it has ever been.”
She stared at him, very pale, her bright eyes wide.
“What then?” she asked.
“Watson,” said Holmes, “be so kind, old man, as to excuse us. Miss Caston and I will retire into the parlour there. It is necessary I speak to her alone. Will you remain here, in the outer room, and stay alert?”
I was at once full of apprehension. Nevertheless I rose without argument, as they left the table. Eleanor Caston seemed to me in those moments almost like a woman gliding in a trance. She and Holmes moved into the parlour, and the door was shut. I took my stance by the fireplace of the dining room.
How slowly those minutes ticked by. Never before, or since, I think, have I observed both hands of a clock moving. Through a gap in the curtains, snow and black night blew violently about together. A log settled, and I started. There was no other sound. Yet then I heard Miss Caston laugh. She had a pretty laugh, musical as her piano. There after, the silence came again.
I began to pace about. Holmes had given me no indication whether I should listen at the door, or what I should do. Now and then I touched the revolver in my pocket.
At last, the hands of the clock closed upon midnight. At this hour, the curse of the Gall, real or imagined, was said to end.
Taking up my glass, I drained it. The next second I heard Miss Caston give a wild shrill cry, followed by a bang, and a crash like that of a breaking vase.
I ran to the parlour door and flung it open. I met a scene that checked me.
The long doors stood wide on the terrace and the night and in at them blew the wild snow, flurrying down upon the carpet. Only Eleanor Caston was in the room. She lay across the sofa, her hair streaming, her face as white as porcelain, still as a waxwork.
I crossed to her, my feet crunching on glass that had scattered from a broken pane of the windows. I thought to find her dead, but as I reached her, she stirred and opened her eyes.
“Miss Caston—what has happened? Are you hurt?”
“Yes,” she said, “wounded mortally.”
There was no mark on her, however, and now she gave me an awful smile. “He is out there.”
“Who is? Where is Holmes?”
She sank back again and shut her eyes. “On the terrace. Or in the garden. Gone.”
I went at once to the windows, taking out the revolver as I did so. Even through the movement of the snow, I saw Holmes at once, at the far end of the terrace, lit up by the lighted windows of the house. He was quite alone. I called to him, and at my voice he turned, glancing at me, shaking his head, and holding up one hand to bar me from the night. He too appeared unharmed and his order to remain where I was seemed very clear.
Going back into the dining room I fetched a glass of brandy. Miss Caston had sat up, and took it from me on my return.
“How chivalrous you always are, Doctor.”
Her pulse was strong, although not steady. I hesitated to increase her distress but the circumstances brooked no delay. “Miss Caston, what has gone on here?”
“Oh, I have gambled and lost. Shall I tell you? Pray sit down. Close the window if you wish. He will not return this way.”
Unwillingly I did as she said, and noted Holmes had now vanished, presumably into the icy garden below.
“Well then, Miss Caston.”
She smiled again that sorry smile, and began to speak.
“All my life I have had nothing, but then my luck changed. It was as if Fate took me by the hand, and anything I had ever wanted might at last be mine. I have always been alone. I had no parents, no friends. I do not care for people much, they are generally so stupid. And then, Lucy, my maid read me your stories, Doctor, of the wonderful Mr. Holmes. Oh, I was not struck by your great literary ability. My intimates have been Dante and Sophocles, Milton, Aristotle and Erasmus. I am sure you do not aspire to compete with them. But Holmes, of course—ah, there. His genius shines through your pages like a great white light from an obscure lantern. At first I thought you had invented this marvellous being, this man of so many parts: chemist, athlete, actor, detective, deceiver—the most effulgent mind this century has known. So ignorant I was. But little Lucy told me that Sherlock Holmes was quite real. She even knew of his address, 221B Baker Street, London.”
Miss Caston gazed into her thoughts and I watched her, prepared at any moment for a relapse, for she was so blanched, and she trembled visibly.
“From your stories, I have learned that Holmes is attracted by anything which engages his full interest. That he honours a mind which can duel with his own. And here you have it all, Doctor. I had before me in the legend of this house, the precise means to offer him just such a plot as many of your tales describe—the Caston Gall, which of course is a farrago of anecdote, coincidence and superstition. I had had nothing, but now I had been given so much, why should I not try for everything?”
“You are saying you thought that Holmes—”
“I am saying I wanted the esteem and friendship of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, that especial friendship and esteem which any woman hopes for, from the man she has come to reverence above all others.”
“In God’s name, Miss Caston! Holmes!”
“Oh, you have written often enough of his coldness, his arrogance, and his dislike of my sex. But then, what are women as a rule but silly witless creatures, geese done up in ribbons. I have a mind. I sought to show him. I knew he would solve my riddle in the end, and so he did. I thought he would laugh and shake my hand.”
“He believed you in the toils of some villain, a man ruthless and powerful.”
“As if no woman could ever connive for herself. He told me what he thought. I convinced him of the truth, and that I worked only for myself, but never to harm him. I wanted simply to render him some sport.”
“Miss Caston,” I said, aghast, “you will have angered him beyond reason.”
Her form drooped. She shut her eyes once more. “Yes, you are quite right. I have enraged him. Never have I seen such pitiless fury in a face. It was as if he struck me with a lash of steel. I was mistaken, and have lost everything.”
Agitated as I was, I tried to make her sip the brandy but she only held it listlessly in one hand, and stood up, leaning by the fireplace.
“I sent Lucy away because she began, I thought, to suspect my passion. There has been nothing but ill-will round me since then. You see, I am becoming as superstitious as the rest. I should like to beg you to intercede for me—but I know it to be useless.”
“I will attempt to explain to him, when he is calmer, that you meant no annoyance. That you mistakenly thought to amuse him.”
As I faltered, she rounded on me, her eyes flaming. “You think you are worthy of him, Watson? The only friend he will tolerate. What I would have offered him! My knowledge, such as it is, my ability to work, which is marvellous. All my funds. My love, which I have never given any other. In return I would have asked little. Not marriage, not one touch of his hand. I would have lain down and let him walk upon me if it would have given him ease.”
She raised her glass suddenly and threw it on the hearth. It broke in sparkling pieces.
“There is my heart,” said she. “Good night, Doctor.” And with no more than that, she went from the room.
I never saw her again. In the morning when we left that benighted house, she sent down no word. Her carriage took us to Chislehurst, from where we made a difficult Christmas journey back to London.
Holmes’s mood was beyond me, and I kept silent as we travelled. He was like one frozen, but to my relief his health seemed sound. On our return, I left him alone as much as I could. Nor did I quiz him on what he did, or what means he used to allay his bitternes
s and inevitable rage. It was plain to me the episode had been infinitely horrible to him. He was so finely attuned. Another would not have felt it so. She had outraged his very spirit. Worse, she had trespassed.
Not until the coming of a new year did he refer to the matter, and then only once. “The Caston woman, Watson. I am grateful to you for your tact.”
“It was unfortunate.”
“You suppose her deranged and vulgar, and that I am affronted at having been duped.”
“No, Holmes. I should never put it in that way. And she was but too plausible.”
“There are serpents among the apples, Watson,” was all he said. And turning from me, he struck out two or three discordant notes on his violin, then put it from him and strode into the other room.
We have not discussed it since, the case of the Caston Gall.
A year later, this morning, which is once more the day of Christmas Eve, I noted a small item in the paper. A Miss Eleanor Rose Caston died yesterday, at her house near Chislehurst. It is so far understood she had accidentally taken too much of an opiate prescribed to her for debilitating headaches. She passed in her sleep, and left no family nor any heirs. She was twenty-six years of age.
Whether Holmes, who takes an interest in all notices of death, has seen this sad little obituary, I do not know. He has said nothing. For myself, I feel a deep regret for her. If we were all to be punished for our foolishness, as I believe Hamlet says, who should ’scape whipping? Although crime is often solvable, there can be no greater mystery than that of the human heart.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
As the creator of historical mysteries with her Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels, Anne Perry is indisputably one of the world’s most popular mystery writers. She lives in a small fishing village on the remote North Sea coast of Scotland.
Peter Lovesey is well known to mystery readers the world over as the creator of Victorian-age police officers Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray. Other creations include using King Edward VII as a sleuth in another take on the Victorian age. In between these series he has also written dozens of short stories, as well as several television plays. A winner of both the Silver and Gold Dagger awards from the Crime Writers Association, he recently added another laurel to his list of honors by winning the Mystery Writers of America story contest with his short story “The Pushover.”
Barbara Paul has a PhD in Theatre History and Criticism and taught at the University of Pittsburgh until the late seventies when she became a full-time writer. She has written five science fiction novels and sixteen mysteries, six of which are in the Marian Larch series. Her most recent book is Jack Be Quick and Other Crime Stories.
Loren D. Estleman is the author of forty-seven books, including the Amos Walker detective series, several Westerns, and the Detroit historical mystery series, including Whiskey River, Motown, King of the Corner, and Thunder City. His first Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula, has been in print for twenty years.
Like many lawyers these days, Carolyn Wheat has put her legal skills, honed by the Brooklyn chapter of the Legal Aid Society, to good use in her novels, which feature Cass Jameson. She has taught mystery writing at the New School in New York City, and legal writing at Brooklyn Law School. Recent novels include Mean Streak and Troubled Waters. An Adventuress of Sherlock Holmes, Carolyn’s investiture is The Penang Lawyer.
Edward D. Hoch makes his living as a writer in a way that very few other people can attest to—he works almost entirely in short fiction. With hundreds of stories primarily in the mystery and suspense genres, he has created such notable characters as Simon Ark, the 2,000-year-old detective, Nick Velvet, the professional thief who only steals worthless objects, to the calculating Captain Leopold, whose appearance in the short story “The Oblong Room” won his creator the Edgar award for best short story.
L. B. Greenwood’s fiction has appeared in Malice Domestic, Malice Domestic III, and Malice Domestic IV. She is also one of the few women to take up the mantle of Sherlock Holmes in novel form. Her pastiches include Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Raleigh Legacy and Sherlock Holmes and the Thistle of Scotland. She lives in British Columbia, Canada.
Bill Crider is the author of more than twenty mystery, Western, and horror novels as well as numerous short stories. Too Late to Die won the Anthony Award for favorite first mystery novel in 1987, and Dead on the Island was nominated for a Shamus Award as best first private eye novel.
Jon L. Breen has written six mystery novels, most recently Hot Air (1991), and over seventy short stories; contributes review columns to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and The Armchair Detective; was short-listed for the Dagger Awards for his novel Touch of the Past (1988); and has won two Edgars, two Anthonys, a Macavity, and an American Mystery Award for his critical writings.
Daniel Stashower is the author of Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as a Sherlockian pastiche, The Adventure of the Ectoplasmic Man. He is a winner of The Raymond Chandler Fulbright Fellowship in Detective and Crime Fiction Writing. He lives in Washington, D. C.
Tanith Lee has made her reputation by successfully mixing science fiction, heroic fantasy, and fairy tales into a unique mix all her own. Often turning fantasy conventions upside down, her examination of the ambiguities of moral behavior can be found in her novels Death’s Master, Dark Dance, and Darkness, I. A World Fantasy Award winner, Lee lives in East Sussex, England.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Jon L. Lellenberg
The Christmas Gift
Anne Perry
The Four Wise Men
Peter Lovesey
Eleemosynary, My Dear Watson
Barbara Paul
The Adventure of the Greatest Gift
Loren D. Estleman
The Case of the Rajah’s Emerald
Carolyn Wheat
The Christmas Conspiracy
Edward D. Hoch
The Music of Christmas
L. B. Greenwood
The Adventure of the Christmas Bear
Bill Crider
The Adventure of the Naturalist’s Stock Pin
Jon L. Breen
The Adventure of the Second Violet
Daniel Stashower
The Human Mystery
Tanith Lee
About the Authors
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is http://www.penguinputnam.com
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