“You think the odds longer for accidents or street crime than for that of a spectral appearance from a parallel universe?” I responded, dismissively.
Both appeared full of doubt. I didn’t blame them.
I do not make a habit of lying. Disguise, artifice, misdirection, contrivance, yes. These are tools with which I am not merely familiar, but expert. However, lying like this to my own client, Conan Doyle, and to Ms. Watson, effectively my partner on this case, was different. I didn’t like it. But what choice did I have? I needed to gauge Conan Doyle’s reaction. His potential willingness to let go of the wonder he had experienced. In that regard, I suppose, the lies proved effective.
“No!” Conan Doyle insisted. “I will not believe you, Holmes. I saw what I saw. And I heard the voice and felt the warm breath of the crippled Baldwin’s spirit in my ear. It was no trick of film projection and mirrors. I know how that fraudulent business is done. Do you think me a fool?”
I shook my head but managed no words before he continued, growing further enraged.
“Your brother in government bought you off, Holmes,” he insisted. “I see that now. I don’t know what he gave you, but he’s turned you. Goddamn you, Holmes. Don’t think my account to the newspapers won’t expose this. All of it.”
Any such account to the newspaper would not only fail ever to be published but would also serve as his death warrant.
He started from the room.
My course of action had been determined. “Wait!” I called.
Conan Doyle had made his determination clear. Also clear was that his life was more important than his reputation. I knew he’d likely disagree, being a man of honor, but I suspected his family would align on my side, though they would never know it had come down to one or the other. “You haven’t asked what I have in the satchel, Conan Doyle,” I offered, picking it up from the table.
“What is it?” he ventured.
“What may have seemed wondrous to us before, whether false or true, was mere prologue,” I said. “What I do or do not believe about the manifestation of the alternate Stanley Baldwin is irrelevant now. What I have here changes everything.”
He took a step toward the table.
“Sit down, Conan Doyle. Mrs. Watson.” As they once again took chairs, I opened the satchel.
This is not about winged fairies.
Nonetheless, I beg your patience. I know that this narrative already strains credulity in the manner with which it treats the unprovable assertion that there may be more than one me, more than one you, more than one world, indeed, that there may be literally countless versions of everything in existence. I don’t know what I’d make of reading such jabberwocky myself. Or perhaps I do know what I’d make of it.
So, I do not bring up fairies lightly, as my reliability as narrator may already be suspect.
Fairies are, indeed, the last thing I can imagine offering to win your trust.
Nonetheless, it is fairies that lead us to our conclusion.
Some years ago, Conan Doyle became involved professionally in the case of a pair of sisters, mere girls from a Yorkshire village, who claimed to have photographed fairies in the woods behind their home. Tiny, humanoid creatures with wings. I knew of Conan Doyle’s association with the ludicrous story only because Dr. Watson happened upon it one morning in the back pages of the newspaper as we took tea in our rooms at Baker Street. He recognized Conan Doyle’s name from the minor legal entanglement the two had endured long before over the issue of plagiarism in Conan Doyle’s short story “B.24.” John and I indulged in some uncharitable chuckling over Conan Doyle’s spirited defense of the fairy photographs.
Don’t get me wrong. I do not believe in fairies and neither should you.
When the young girls’ photographs were adjudged by the public to be frauds, the story subsided, and Conan Doyle turned his attention elsewhere. His reputation was not much besmirched, primarily because his argument for the girls and their encounter with fairies had gained so little attention. After all, his name was then still somewhat obscure, having not yet achieved the renown that came with the publication of his most recent novel, The Lost World, and the attendant exposure created by its successful cinema adaptation. See real dinosaurs! Since the success, he’d devoted his journalistic and public speaking efforts to the support of Spiritualism, which enjoys a more popular and, if I may be allowed to use the word loosely, respectable status among the public than ever have winged fairies. This is why his journalistic reputation, at the time of these events, was largely rehabilitated. This, of course, also accounted for the particular attention he’d garnered from my brother and his ilk. Hence the bullet near his spine, which had been intended to kill.
My suspicion about the assassination attempt on my unknown East Indian mystic, Siddhartha Singh, who carried no such cultural weight as Conan Doyle, was that the current incarnation of the Eureka Society may have suspected the two were working together and had concluded that there was no sense taking any chances, there being no downside to the murder of an immigrant anyway.
In any case, I knew now that I could never dissuade Sir Arthur from attempting to publish his account of the manifestation of an alternative, crippled version of our still-living PM. He was nothing if not brave.
So I’d chosen this other tack.
“What’s in the satchel?” Conan Doyle asked, settled once more at the kitchen table. His tone remained disgruntled with my apparent betrayal, but his curiosity would not allow him to ignore possibilities.
Mrs. Watson watched silently. I did not look at her, but I felt her eyes on me.
I knew she was confused, but I also knew she still trusted me.
I removed from the satchel a pile of papers; some were typed and stamped with official government seals, while others were merely handwritten notes. Additionally, I removed a half dozen photographs. I placed it all facedown on the table. “While in Mycroft’s private office, he left me alone for a short time, during which I took the opportunity to peruse his desk and files.” Mycroft had no private office, besides the Diogenes Club, but neither Conan Doyle nor Mrs. Watson could know that for sure. My entire technique was narrowing now to dissimulation. I thought of Hemingway’s assertion in Paris that the nearest thing to being a writer was being a detective and vice versa. He’d meant it in a different sense. But I’d been creating a fiction all morning. Surely, John would have recommended I document here some more heroic way to save my companions than simply falsifying photographs, but, as I have said frequently on these pages, I am not John. He is irreplaceable to me. Besides, this is how it happened.
“Did you find something in your brother’s office?” Mrs. Watson asked.
“I found nothing relating to the case at hand. That’s why I had nothing to report, except the litany of denial and rationalization as it was given to me by Mycroft. You may blame me, Sir Arthur, but I only passed on to you what I was told, plausible or not. Believe what you will. I too have doubts about my brother’s testimony. However, in his brief absence from his office, I found something even more intriguing than any unconventional spirit manifestation.” I indicated the documents and the facedown photographs. “I slipped these out of his office, unbeknownst to him.”
Both Conan Doyle and Mrs. Watson leaned over the table, nearer the documents.
I flipped the pictures over.
“Ah,” Conan Doyle said, immediately recognizing the photograph atop the pile.
It was of a young girl in a woodland keeping company with winged fairies the size of a man’s hand.
“Mycroft had this?” Conan Doyle asked.
“Yes,” I lied. “In a file marked Top Secret.”
Mycroft would never be so careless. But Conan Doyle’s rich and ever optimistic imagination made him among the most gullible men I’d ever met, and Mrs. Watson was following my lead, without need for explanation, out of an unspoken trust that I found both reassuring and reminiscent of her late husband.
“Amazing!” Co
nan Doyle exclaimed, turning over the next photograph.
It ought to have struck him as such, seeing as I’d spent all night in the finest lab in the realm, working with the King’s own photographer, to produce the trick images based on the original, primitive attempt at special-effects photography undertaken by the young girls themselves back in ’17. Indeed, we’d produced photographs impossible to imagine coming from mere village children more than a decade before, unless, of course, the photographs were authentic. What had appeared in the girls’ original photographs, to all but the most credulous eye, as mere, two dimensional cut-outs of magazine images of fairies flitting about, now appeared as fully three dimensional; the tiny creatures’ wings were even slightly blurred by manipulation of the photographic plates. It was a masterful counterfeit of reality.
Too bad they would never see the light of day, their sole display being limited to this room.
“But these photos . . .” Conan Doyle muttered.
“They’re crystal clear,” Mrs. Watson observed. “The fairies are three dimensional.”
“Not like before,” Conan Doyle continued, flipping to the next photograph, which was also of the girl and the fairies.
The pictures would likely have fooled Cecil Beaton.
“I know it’s been some years now since your support for the girls in Cottingley and their photographs, but perhaps it’s not too late to redeem what must seem something of an indignity in your otherwise distinguished journalistic record,” I suggested to Conan Doyle, who perused the last of the photographs in wonder.
“But these are not the photos!” he exclaimed. “I mean, in the years since I championed the girls’ pictures it became obvious, even to me, that I’d been taken in by fakes. I never thought I’d want to revisit the incident. But these pictures . . . What goes on here?”
“These are the girls’ actual photos from 1917,” I lied. “They were confiscated, reworked, and replaced with the images presented to you and others. At the time, of course, even the diminished images were deemed sufficiently evidentiary. At least, by some.”
Conan Doyle shrugged. “By me, for example.”
“And by the girls themselves, who were too young to realize that their actual photographs had been replaced and that they were being played as frauds.”
“But what objection could the powers that be have to fairies?” he asked.
This question crossed too far into the absurd. “I have no answer for that, Sir Arthur.”
“But these photographs constitute proof that will stand up to scrutiny!” he said.
“Yes, proof, which, allow me to remind you, does not exist for your mere testimonial regarding the manifestation of an ‘alternate’ Stanley Baldwin,” I added.
He shuffled through the authentic-looking documentation, his heavily lined face alight. “After the publication of these photographs, along with my account of the conspiracy and my renewed argument for the existence of other-dimensional entities sharing our Earth, namely what we refer to as ‘fairies,’ the public will be more trusting of what I must admit is, indeed, a mere testimonial about the Stanley Baldwin affair. In short, they’ll be more trusting of me.”
Of course, the effect would be just the opposite.
“How quickly can you complete your article to accompany these photographs?” I inquired. “I worry that Mycroft may discover the file missing and confiscate everything before you can submit the package to the newspapers.”
“I’m a very fast writer when I need to be.”
“In this instance, you need to be,” I said.
Mrs. Watson watched the exchange wordlessly.
That afternoon, we each left the safe house for the comforts of our own residences. I knew we were still under surveillance, but such knowledge was not necessary for my former companions. They were free to go about their business. Such was the bargain, at least for the next six days. When I reached my own London rooms I fell into a deep sleep, not awakening until the next evening. Apparently, Conan Doyle needed no such rest but had gotten straight to work.
I am not altogether proud of what followed.
But my charge was to save the man’s life, not his public reputation.
Within forty-eight hours of our leaving the last safe house, Conan Doyle had completed his article asserting that fairies were real, whatever doubts the public expressed when he’d first made such an assertion years before, and he submitted the writing to the Times of London along with the corroborating photographs. The next day, an article ran under the headline “Well Known Author Losing His Mind?” Conan Doyle’s arguments had been excerpted within the larger article, which publicly challenged Sir Arthur’s sanity. Such a charge seemed justified, as the photographs published alongside the damning article were not the meticulous works of prestidigitation that the King’s photographer and I had created a few nights before but the original 1917 photos, which were even more obviously fakes now than they’d been the first time Conan Doyle publicly supported them. Naturally, Mycroft had important connections at the Times. The switch doubtless had been easily achieved. Enraged, Conan Doyle responded with a letter to the editor stating that these were not the photographs he had submitted with his article. The letter made him seem only more unstable. Now, he could shout from the pulpit of St. Paul’s that a manifestation of an alternate Stanley Baldwin had appeared to him during a séance, and he would draw no more than a bemused or perhaps piteous response from the public.
I ruined him.
I saved him.
His wife returned from the Continent; his children visited, bringing to him his grandchildren in hopes of restoring him to sanity.
From all family accounts, it worked.
But his public life was over.
Mycroft was satisfied, except, of course, as regarded what was to become of me.
No arrests ever were made. I achieved justice for neither the shooting of Conan Doyle nor for the murders of Paul Dirac and Sir Richard Gregory. Nor did I either overturn the British government or enlighten the world with a new quantum possibility. Perhaps you are disappointed in the indefatigable Sherlock Holmes; after all, until now you have only known of me through John’s accounts, which were restricted to those cases that offered exactly the satisfactions of villains punished and truth restored.
Once more I remind you that this is real.
Choices had to be made.
Sorry.
The day of the Times article, I called on Mrs. Watson at her Belgravia address. The house where John had lived his final days. The house in which he’d died. She welcomed me as if it were my house now, too.
But it was not.
The weather was lovely, so we passed through the residence to the small back garden, settling beside one another on a comfortable bench overhung by a hawthorn tree. Her housemaid brought the sterling silver tea set, which she set on a fashionably weathered wooden table before us. Then the girl left.
“Shall I pour, Sherlock?” Mrs. Watson asked.
“Yes, please.”
I didn’t know how much explanation Mrs. Watson would require, nor if she would approve of my manipulations. “It’s a hard day for Sir Arthur,” I observed, taking from her the proffered cup and saucer.
“Yes, but he’s safe now.”
She seemed to require little or no explanation.
“Still, I found it difficult to stomach the newspaper this morning,” I said.
She nodded and then sipped her tea. “A quite comprehensive condemnation.”
“He’s a proud man, despite his history of credulous analysis when it comes to various esoterica,” I continued.
“True, but he’s safe now,” she repeated.
“For whatever that’s worth.”
She looked at me, confused. “In the case of Sir Arthur, that’s worth quite a lot.”
“Oh, of course,” I answered. “He’s a fine man.”
She leaned toward me, as if what she were about to say was private. “I believe I understand the q
uite clever part you’ve played in this fairy business, Sherlock. And I want you to know that I heartily approve.”
“Good,” I said. “But I’m not sure that I approve of it.”
“What?”
“Upon reflection, I’m not sure it mightn’t have been kinder to let the government assassins take him.”
“You can’t mean that.”
“Mightn’t his good name be more important to him than his life?”
She set her tea down on the wooden table. When she spoke, it was with friendly certitude. “I think you’re mistaking your own values for his, Sherlock. It’s you who would rather die than be proven incompetent. Or even wrong. I imagine that’s why John only ever wrote about the cases you solved.”
“Well, we did solve most of them.”
She smiled. “Look, Conan Doyle asked you to save his life. And you did.”
His was not the only life I had saved by my irksome dealings with Mycroft. But I said nothing more about that.
“And you identified the guilty party, even if the government and its agents remain beyond punishment,” she continued.
“Yes, but I didn’t ‘get to the bottom of it,’ as I assured Conan Doyle I’d do.”
She edged forward on her seat. “I’m not sure there is a bottom to it,” she said.
“Mrs. Watson, I have not made my name by accepting such premises.”
She sighed. “You’re asking yourself how Conan Doyle found you in Cambridge.” She exhibited an impressive native capacity for what Dupin called ratiocination. “That whole alternate PM business?”
I nodded. “The finest minds in the realm were taken in by my various disguises. So how did Conan Doyle, innocent that he is, turn up in the rooms of Professor von Schimmel? Unless, of course . . .” I stopped, wearied of voicing speculation that sounded like H. G. Wells after a night of drinking.
But Mrs. Watson picked up my aborted sentence without losing a beat. “Unless an ‘alternate’ Stanley Baldwin actually contacted Conan Doyle in the séance room,” she proposed. “A Stanley Baldwin who somehow knew of your disguise and where you were to be found.”
Holmes Entangled Page 18
