“I had married a woman considerably younger than myself, a woman as remarkable for her beauty as for her romantic yet singular temperament, which she had inherited from her Spanish forebears. It was the old story, and when at long last I awoke to the dreadful truth it was also to the knowledge that only one thing remained for me in life—vengeance. Vengeance against this man, who had disgraced my name and abused the honour of my house.
“On the night in question, Lothian and I sat late over our wine in this very room. I had contrived to drug his port, and before the effects of the narcotic could deaden his senses I told him of my discovery, and that death alone could wipe out the score. He sneered back at me that in killing him I would merely put myself on the scaffold and expose my wife’s shame to the world. When I explained my plan, the sneer was gone from his face and the terror of death was freezing in his black heart. The rest you know. As the drug deprived him of his senses, I changed clothes with him, bound his hands with a sash torn from the door-curtain, and carried him across the courtyard to the museum, to the virgin guillotine which had been built for another’s infamy.
“When it was over, I summoned Stephen and told him the truth. The old man never hesitated in his loyalty to his wretched master. Together we buried the head in the family vault and then, seizing a mare from the stable, he rode it across the moor to convey an impression of flight and finally left it concealed in a lonely farm owned by his sister. All that remained was for me to disappear.
“Arnsworth, like many mansions belonging to families that had been Catholic in the olden times, possessed a priest’s hole. There I have lain concealed, emerging only at night into the library to lay my final instructions upon my faithful servant.”
“Thereby confirming my suspicion as to your proximity,” interposed Holmes, “by leaving no fewer than five smears of Turkish tobacco ash upon the rugs. But what was your ultimate intention?”
“In taking vengeance for the greatest wrong which one man can do to another, I had successfully protected our name from the shame of the scaffold. I could rely on Stephen’s loyalty. As for my wife, though she knew the truth she could not betray me without announcing to the world her own infidelity. Life held nothing more for me. I determined therefore to allow myself a day or two in which to get my affairs in order, and then to die by my own hand. I assure you that your discovery of my hiding place has advanced the event by only an hour or so. I had left a letter for Stephen, begging him as his final devoir that he would bury my body secretly in the vaults of my ancestors.
“There, gentlemen, is my story. I am the last of the old line, and it lies with you whether or not it shall go out in dishonour.”
Sherlock Holmes laid a hand upon his.
“It is perhaps as well that it has been pointed out to us already that my friend Watson and I are here in an entirely private capacity,” said he quietly. “I am about to summon Stephen, for I cannot help feeling that you would be more comfortable if he carried this chair into the priest’s hole and closed the sliding panel after you.”
We had to bend our heads to catch Lord Jocelyn’s response.
“Then a higher tribunal will judge my crime,” he whispered faintly, “and the tomb shall devour my secret. Farewell, and may a dying man’s blessing rest upon you.”
Our journey back to London was both chilly and depressing. With nightfall, the snow had recommenced and Holmes was in his least communicative mood, staring out of the window at the scattered lights of villages and farmhouses that periodically flitted past in the darkness.
“The old year is nodding to its fall,” he remarked suddenly, “and in the hearts of all these kindly, simple folk awaiting the midnight chimes dwells the perennial anticipation that what is to come will be better than what has been. Hope, however ingenuous and disproven by past experience, remains the one supreme panacea for all the knocks and bruises which life metes out to us.” He leaned back and began to stuff his pipe with shag.
“Should you eventually write an account of this curious affair in Derbyshire,” he went on, “I would suggest that a suitable title would be ‘the Red Widow.’”
“Knowing your unreasonable aversion to women, Holmes, I am surprised that you noticed the colour of her hair.”
“I refer, Watson, to the popular sobriquet for a guillotine in the days of the French Revolution,” he said severely.
The hour was late when, at last, we reached our old lodgings in Baker Street where Holmes, after poking up the fire, lost not a moment in donning his mouse-coloured dressing gown.
“It is approaching midnight,” I observed, “and as I would wish to be with my wife when this year of 1887 draws to its close, I must be on my way. Let me wish you a happy New Year, my dear fellow.”
“I heartily reciprocate your good wishes, Watson,” he replied. “Pray bear my greetings to your wife, and my apologies for your temporary absence.”
I had reached the deserted street and, pausing for a moment to raise my collar against the swirl of the snowflakes, I was about to set out on my walk when my attention was arrested by the strains of a violin. Involuntarily, I raised my eyes to the window of our old sitting room and there, sharply outlined against the lamplit blind, was the shadow of Sherlock Holmes. I could see that keen, hawk-like profile which I knew so well, the slight stoop of his shoulders as he bent over his fiddle, the rise and fall of the bow tip. But surely this was no dreamy Italian air, no complicated improvisation of his own creation, that drifted down to me through the stillness of that bleak winter’s night.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and auld lang syne?
A snowflake must have drifted into my eyes for, as I turned away, the gas lamps glimmering down the desolate expanse of Baker Street seemed strangely blurred.
My task is done. My notebooks have been replaced in the black tin deed-box where they have been kept in recent years, and, for the last time, I have dipped my pen in the inkwell.
Through the window that overlooks the modest lawn of our farmhouse, I can see Sherlock Holmes strolling among his beehives. His hair is quite white, but his long, thin form is as wiry and energetic as ever, and there is a touch of healthy colour in his cheeks, placed there by Mother Nature and her clover-laden breezes that carry the scent of the sea amid these gentle Sussex Downs.
Our lives are drawing towards eventide, and old faces and old scenes are gone forever. And yet, as I lean back in my chair and close my eyes, for a while the past rises up to obscure the present, and I see before me the yellow fogs of Baker Street, and I hear once more the voice of the best and wisest man whom I have ever known.
“Come, Watson, the game’s afoot!”
THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF THE URN OF ASH; OR, WHAT WOULD SHERLOCK DO?
DEBORAH MORGAN
Deborah Morgan is an award-winning writer of both fiction and nonfiction. Her five antique-lover mystery novels were published by Berkley, and are now available in eBook format. Although she has published short stories in both the western and mystery genres, this is her first featuring the main character of her novels, antiques picker Jeff Talbot. This story is a clever take on how Jeff, a newcomer to the canon, becomes hooked on the indomitable Sherlock Holmes—and how he stumbles upon a Holmes-worthy case when he acquires an old trunk full of Sherlockian memorabilia. Published here for the first time, by permission of the author.
Let go a single sheet of paper, observe it as it slowly slices through air before alighting nowhere near your predicted destination for it, and you will understand how ethereal an object it is. Or, watch the solitary snowflake, near weightless in its lacy form, as it floats and drifts toward a soundless landing.
Put thousands of either together, and you’ll need some muscle to move them.
Jeff Talbot fought the urge to supervise as the two stout men lifted the mammoth camelback trunk from the back of the panel wagon. Before their arrival, he ha
d brought a pushcart from the carriage house near his home’s back door. He’d pointed it out more than once to the pair.
Jeff rubbed his shoulder. The wound had healed—it had been a year since he’d been shot—but it most certainly limited him when it came to chores that involved much lifting. Now, too, he had his own built-in barometer, which often was on active duty (a curse of living in the Northwest). He was barely into his forties, and the necessity to hire movers went against the grain.
With a Queen Anne home full of Victorian antiques, Jeff didn’t often acquire large or heavy items. This, however, couldn’t be passed up.
It had belonged to an old woman who, until her death the day prior, had been a resident of a local nursing facility since before the new millennium. She had no relatives to list as next of kin, and since it was required that someone be listed in order for her to become a resident, she had used her medical doctor. That doctor, Michael Danville, was a friend of Jeff’s, and had called him when the woman passed. “I have no clue what’s in it,” Mike had said, “and I don’t want to know. She was adamant about keeping it, but I’m told it hasn’t been opened since 1986, when she moved in. To tell you the truth, she was adamant about everything. I don’t need any reminders of her.
“Take it, Jeff. I’m off to Japan tomorrow, so I’ve already told the director of nursing that you’ll be picking it up.”
Jeff jotted down the information. An antiques picker by trade, he offered a fair sum to his friend, who turned it down.
“Being listed as next of kin happens more often than you might think. The last thing I need is another trunk full of a musty old woman’s musty old belongings. You’re doing me a favor.”
Musty old women’s musty old belongings were Jeff’s bread and butter, so he accepted.
The trunk was as near pristine a specimen as Jeff had ever encountered. Its polished wood, richly embossed leather, and brass fittings had been well maintained over the years. He had stopped by the facility, made the necessary arrangements, along with a cursory glance inside when he checked that the key worked, then arranged for a moving company to do the heavy lifting.
Now he hovered, anxious to get the beautiful, beastly thing inside and commence digging through it. The weather was perfect for an indoor treasure hunt. Cold and rainy, with a lingering fog. It felt like London, and Jeff had spied an old London map in the trunk. He took comfort in pairings such as that. They satisfied like the snapping together of puzzle pieces.
The men hoisted the mammoth trunk and, ignoring the pushcart, started up the steep steps, the smaller of the two going backwards. They were used to moving furniture in Seattle, Jeff could tell.
Greer, a pleasant-looking young man and the Talbots’ butler since his graduation from butling school a decade before, waited patiently at the top of the steps. He held in his hands a perfectly folded bar towel.
“How many bodies you got in here?” the younger of the two men asked.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know what’s in it,” Jeff said.
The men stopped dead in their tracks.
“I mean, I glanced inside. Ephemera, mostly, from what I could tell. But the one thing I know is not in it is a body.”
“Ephemera?” the younger mover said.
“Papers and such,” said his partner.
“Oh, I thought that was ethereal,” he said as they resumed climbing.
The trunk was placed on a tarp in the library, where Greer wiped it down with the towel. Jeff scratched out a check, then the butler led the workers from the room.
Jeff retrieved the key from his jacket pocket and unlocked the hasp. The hinges creaked and groaned as he lifted the lid. A century earlier, when either train or steamship was the chosen mode of travel, impatient travelers preferred these domed trunks, as they could only be stacked at the top, and thus were the first unloaded at depot or port.
Greer had cleared all items from the large library table, and Jeff commenced filling it, taking care to group according to subcategory. As he did so, he noted that the European maps, journals, newspaper clippings, bound sheaves of papers, and small publications boasted one theme and one theme only: Sherlock Holmes.
The scent of mimeograph ink lingered. Or was it from a Ditto machine? Although he couldn’t recall which machine produced the often-blotchy purple ink that stained the memories of mid-twentieth-century schoolchildren, the scent itself was unmistakable.
The copies—dozens, by his estimation—were of short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about Sherlock Holmes. Each story, held together by a paper clip that had left its rusty impression, was worn and dog-eared, the margins heavy with annotation.
London maps had once been thumbtacked to walls; that was easy to deduce by pinholes in the center of rust-edged circular imprints at every corner. Jeff unfolded one and spied a dot of light shining through it. Closer examination revealed that a place on Baker Street had once been pinpointed. He wasn’t a fan of Sherlock Holmes, but even he had heard of the famous address at 221B.
Copies of The Serpentine Muse, slim publications with various dates from the 1970s but with cover designs that looked more like apothecary labels from Victorian times, carried the subtitle A Quarterly Publication of the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes.
A women’s group dedicated to Sherlock Holmes? Jeff made a mental note to investigate further.
Bundles of letters, along with larger envelopes—those would be greeting cards—were tied with soft silk ribbons in dove grays, blues, pinks. He fluttered the upper right corners of several stacks, noting that most of the postmarks were from the 1970s and ’80s.
At 4:00 P.M., Greer entered the library with the coffee tray and found Jeff sitting in an armchair near the fireplace, reading from a slender stack of copy paper. The butler announced that the newspaper had not yet been delivered.
Jeff looked up. “Elementary, my dear Watson.”
Greer raised a brow, barely discernible. “Sir?”
He thumped the stack with a knuckle. “Looks like most of this loot has to do with Sherlock Holmes.”
“Interesting, sir.” Greer set down the tray, poured coffee from a silver-plated pot. “If I may take the liberty of saying so, that particular phrase was never written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.”
It was Jeff’s turn to raise a brow. “Greer, don’t tell me you’re a Sherlockian.”
“I am well acquainted with the stories, but have never been so zealous as to attend meetings, dress in costume, or take part in quizzes.”
“Quizzes? You’re not serious.”
“If you mean to ask whether quizzes are taken, then I assure you I am serious.”
“So, these meetings . . . ?”
“The Baker Street Irregulars. There are scions, as well, and—” The phone rang. “Excuse me, sir,” Greer said as he left the room.
Jeff took a drink of the strong coffee, one of his favorite Tully’s blends, then placed the cup on the hearth and returned to the story. While he read “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” the beverage, forgotten, grew cold. He set aside the papers when he had finished the last page, reflecting upon his childhood and a long-forgotten love of cryptographs, like those used in the story.
Other duties called him, but Jeff managed to spend every available moment over the next few days on the task of unpacking the trunk. Carefully, he set aside the bundles of ribbon-bound correspondence, not yet wishing to dismantle them for fear of separating the contents from their respective envelopes. Maps, magazines, and clippings were also stacked for future perusal.
The copied short stories, however, were another thing. They beckoned him, captured him. Invariably, he would glance at one, meaning only to read the opening, and, without conscious thought, would settle himself once again into his armchair by the fire, consumed by yet another tale.
Although it was difficult to ignore the annotations meticulously printed along the margins and in the tiniest of hands, ignore them he must. He’d never read Sir Arthur Cona
n Doyle’s works, and he didn’t want someone else’s take on the games afoot to sway him, or give away the solution before he’d had his own go at it.
He barely noticed when Greer entered to tend the fire or serve coffee, as he was caught up in noticing many inconsistencies among the stories, as well as downright errors about some elements. Oddly, though, that didn’t stop him from reading. He was hooked on the characters, and this fact thoroughly surprised him.
However, as Jeff’s new obsession continued, he buttonholed Greer at every turn, engaging him in conversations about Sherlock Holmes, asking him questions, pointing out discovered errors.
Greer, always the dutiful butler, answered questions, shared knowledge, even loaned his employer some books on the subject: The Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and The Complete Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes: A Facsimile of the Original Strand Magazine Stories, 1891–1893. This last title Jeff found to be a real treat, as it included original illustrations by Sidney Paget.
Sheila, who had been busy helping plan the annual harvest fair, popped her blonde head in from time to time to check on her husband. On day five of The Adventure of the Trunk in the Middle of the Room, she walked in and said, “How can you stand it, not knowing what else is in there?”
Jeff rose and kissed her. “You must be finished with your committee work.”
She reached toward the trunk, then paused. “May I?”
“Of course. Just put the ones like these—” he held up his current reading material—“at this end of the table.” He returned to his chair.
Sheila clearly wasn’t distracted by the stories. She moved quickly, stacking mimeographed sheets where her husband had indicated, and the rest of the papers with their like-minded groups on the large table.
“Would you look at this?” She lifted from the trunk a large department store box, ivory with a floral bouquet image, and tilted it so that Jeff could see the lid. The logo was written in an elegant script that read, “The Bon Marché Fur Salon.”
The Adventure of the Plated Spoon and Other Tales of Sherlock Holmes Page 12
