The Patient's Eyes: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes

by Pirie, David

  ‘But I realised I had power over him and so when I became desperate perhaps I did provoke his attack on Mr Greenwell. But I swear I never desired the death of your friend. I could not always control Horler, as you saw when you rescued me. I will be happy to see he has clemency.’

  ‘So we are agreed. We need say no more,’ said the Doctor with a curious flatness which enraged me.

  I had had enough. ‘Say no more!’ I turned to her. ‘But what happened here? What happened in this house? Were they cruel?’

  Now she looked directly at me and some of the old emotion was back in her. I could see she was finding it hard to express what she wanted to say to me.

  ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘But they … that is, there was little love … It was like a prison. But I did love. I did. They would never allow it. Never. I wanted so much to tell you … I tried.’ And she came forward towards me as if I could absolve her.

  ‘Coatley,’ said Bell.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Coatley. They found us that night. In this room. There.’ She was looking at the window seat. ‘It had been the happiest night of my life, I never knew such happiness. Never. What was I to do? What?’

  She turned back to me. ‘It is why the song means so much. It was he who sang it. He was my bleeding knight. And he did bleed. He died for me. And then, when it was over, I made up my mind what I wanted. I had waited for it so long and they were going to stop me. My uncle and Guy. Take my independence, my freedom. All the things you know as a right. Have you any idea what it is like to lose them? Can you not see what it means?’

  There was no answer. All my hopes had turned to ashes in my mouth. I had been used, as the Doctor perceived. ‘And your eyes?’ I asked, feeling like the most trusting little fool in the whole of the country.

  ‘It was real, I swear. As were my dreams. My eyes are always the same. Around this time of year, when they died.’

  THE STRAIGHT LINE AND THE MINOTAUR

  Doctor Bell once observed that the final and most dangerous stage of a Greek labyrinth is a single straight line. It is on that last apparently simple stretch that many thinkers and detectives lose their reason. I had occasion to think of this more than once after that night at Abbey Mill. In retrospect, the climax seemed to have an awful inevitability: suddenly we emerged from the maze and on to the straight that ended in that room. And there I found my heart’s sickness just as once before I had found it on a beach.

  Of course, rationally I knew that Heather Grace’s crimes, brutal as they were, could hardly be compared with the mad acts in Edinburgh. But there was still a hideous irony about this outcome, which twisted the knife in my soul. How slowly and painstakingly I had rebuilt my heart, only to lose it to someone who was herself guilty of murders. Here was my Minotaur, and I never dreamed of how it would look until we arrived at the end and I saw it.

  In the days after that awful night at Abbey Mill the Doctor was at his very best. He rarely referred to the matter, but considered only my welfare, even delaying his departure north, though by now he had urgent business in Edinburgh. For a time he even took over my patients, telling them I was indisposed, and he would have happily performed this task all week but I was determined not to let him. For the work was a useful distraction.

  In the evenings, usually on the Doctor’s urging, we would engage in games of reasoning and deduction. He would propose a real or imagined puzzle, another cryptogram, some strange feature of a case, or a particularly abstruse clue from his vast store of recollections and then we would use it to test my skill. Sometimes we merely sat at the window and watched passers-by, attempting to deduce their occupation or family life or mental and physical condition. Once or twice, when I was listless, I am convinced he would deliberately put himself in the wrong by planting some ludicrous piece of speculation just to see if I would pick it up.

  There was one occasion, for example, when I was particularly low in spirits as we sat at the window, discussing the character and occupation of passers-by. The Doctor insisted that a woman with young children was their mother, supporting his case with a series of extremely abstruse observations about her coat, her hands, her show of affection and a ring on her finger. I was quite certain from the age of the eldest child, the items the woman carried and, indeed, her whole demeanour that she was a governess. The debate flew back and forth with gusto and finally we rushed out and followed them.

  Bell pretended to be confounded when five or six streets away the true mother greeted the party at her front door. But I had my doubts and, as time went on, I became increasingly certain that most of these carefully crafted ‘mistakes’ were little more than an attempt to restore my spirits.

  After a few days I walked out alone on the beach I had always avoided and made myself think of the woman I had lost in Edinburgh. As I looked at the waves, in my mind’s eye I suddenly saw her very clearly. She was dead but there was her face, framed in its halo of hair, her impish smile. And as the surf pounded on the sand in my ears, she seemed to be telling me I should try to see the cosmic absurdity of it: a man sees his first love murdered, then finally, after many years, renews his affections for another woman, only to discover his new love has murdered twice or even (on the worst construction of her role in the death of Greenwell) three times.

  I have no idea if it was sane or healthy or proper, but I threw back my head in the wind and rain and laughed with Elsbeth’s ghost. Then I laughed and cried a little more, without any disrespect for those who had died, and I felt better for it as I turned to come home.

  After another week the Doctor saw he could leave me and a date was arranged for his departure. Meanwhile we learned that Miss Heather Grace would be leaving the town to live in London as she had always intended.

  The Doctor had arranged matters so he would depart on Monday’s mid-morning train, before connecting to the north and we became aware she would be taking this train too. I suppose, looking back on it, the Doctor had designed this coincidence to allow for unfinished business and test my own nerve. No doubt if I had protested he would have made other arrangements, but he knew quite well I would never give in to such cowardice and our plans remained as they were.

  And so, just as the affair of the Miss Heather Grace’s eyes had begun on that station platform when James Heriot Turnavine Cullingworth accosted me, months earlier, so it ended there.

  We appeared, to find that a crowd of friends and well-wishers had gathered to see Miss Grace leave the town. She was, after all, now not only a rich heiress but also one who had survived two attempts on her life. The matter of Captain Horler had not been given wide publicity and the man himself seemed likely to spend his days in an asylum, but word of it had spread. Through this throng, I glimpsed her in the distance, solemnly kissing her aunt and uncle goodbye. From her appearance and her luggage and servants, it was possible to see how she had been translated by independence into the epitome of a rich and emancipated woman.

  The Doctor and I nodded at Inspector Warner, who had already paid his respects. I even passed Cullingworth, who smiled faintly when he saw me but avoided looking in my eye. Not for the first time, I thought of the man’s odd warnings about his former patient: did he perhaps after all have some dim perception of the truth?

  It was Mrs Blythe who saw us first and came over to greet us warmly. ‘Look at the crowds, gentlemen,’ she said happily. ‘We are so thankful to you, Dr Bell. She is greatly loved. Oh, she is leaving a present for Dr Doyle, something she says she no longer wants.’

  Miss Grace concluded her instructions for the loading of her luggage and came over. I could see she was much more groomed and still extremely beautiful. Her eye was on me, but first she came to the Doctor. She would have put out her hand but saw from his expression he would not take it, so she merely nodded. ‘I have made a statement to Inspector Warner,’ she told him gravely. ‘I understand from him it seems likely the Captain will be deemed mad and spared the gallows.’

  ‘Yes, he told me,’ said Bell. ‘I will n
ot thank you but you may conclude our agreement stands.’ And he moved off, leaving her to me.

  She came over to me, now, and stood close by me, her eyes intense. ‘You remember once I said I saw something in you. It was all true.’

  There was something very appealing and genuine in her expression but I held her gaze. ‘It was a lie,’ I said.

  ‘No, it was not. Most of what I told you was the truth. What I felt for you was true. I knew we shared something. And you ought to realise … I was seventeen and what I did, however awful, I did for love …’

  I could not reply. For all the high hopes I had entertained were gone and here at the end of them was just this single moment. And again I asked myself the same question as I had once before: is it pride that brings me here? Is it the godlike pride that we can solve great mysteries, where others have failed, that brings me to this bitter sense of my own failure and of human frailty?

  ‘Will you say nothing?’ her voice interrupted my thoughts.

  ‘Only that I believed in you once.’

  ‘Then you must face something,’ she said. And she leant forward and I could feel her softness and warmth, all the sweetness I had once held, as she kissed me on the cheek and whispered without artifice, ‘A part of you always will … my own.’

  Then she was gone.

  Her words had such an effect I do not think I saw her enter the train, but a servant was handing me a parcel.

  Blindly I followed where Bell had gone further up the platform. I reached him and we said nothing. I was relieved to see he had secured a compartment far away down the train, where there were few people.

  ‘As to what you are thinking, there must be a way,’ he said.

  ‘A way?’

  ‘To apply the method as rigorously to human character as to forensic detail. Let me think about it.’

  ‘I would be glad if you did.’

  For some reason his words comforted me. I had indeed been trying to apply some rudimentary analysis to Miss Grace’s extraordinary character. She believed what she said, I was sure of that. But did that make it true? On that afternoon when she was recovering from her ordeal, she had asked me to visit her in London and we had all but declared ourselves. Suppose the Doctor had never made his startling revelation, would we have renewed this happiness? Or would I have endured the slow agony of seeing her slip away in yet another direction? Perhaps it was only a desire for consolation, but I strongly suspected it would have been the latter. And even now, in spite of the fact that she seems never to have properly married, I must try to believe it.

  The Doctor was safely in his train now and appraised me humorously, standing at its window. No more words were needed on the subject. The guard raised his flag and a whistle was blowing. ‘To our next case,’ he said, as the train began to move …

  ‘To my further education,’ I countered.

  He said something but I could not catch it. The train was carrying him away.

  I could see him smiling as he leant out of the window. ‘What?’ I shouted.

  ‘And to mine. And to mine,’ the words floated back.

  And he was gone. I stood there on the now empty platform. Then I remembered the parcel.

  I sat down and opened it. There, in my hands, was her small musical jewellery case. I lifted the lid and once again I heard that carol.

  And in that bed there lies a knight,

  Whose wounds they do bleed by day and by night

  I have the case beside me now. But I will not open it. I return it to its box and close it.

  EPILOGUE

  11.05 p.m., 13 October 1898

  The fire is low now and it is late. Louise has been asking for me and I must go to her.

  But I have had another parcel. The maid did not wish to disturb me while I was working and has brought it in only in these past minutes. I stare at it now, as yet I cannot bring myself to open it.

  But I know from the string and the address, handwritten this time, that all my fears have foundation. Something has come back. Something which should by all that is sane have ended for ever with a black flag outside Newgate on a drizzling Tuesday in October nearly ten years ago. Good God, even the clothes were bought by Tussauds’, I believe they paid £200 for them!

  This makes it certain I have only a short time. So I have forced myself to take that infernal unopened box and placed it on the desk beside my writing pad. Then I cannot shrink from the task when I return in the morning …

  Surely it will be easier in the daylight …

  Notes

  The Beale cipher is widely regarded as genuine and was first discovered around the 1880s.

  Never officially solved.

  Note: This is still true. The Beale cipher has been subjected to endless computer analysis by cryptographers throughout the twentieth century, but the ‘locality’ cipher remains entirely mysterious and, unlike Bell, nobody has achieved any translation at all.

  THE PATIENT’S EYES. Copyright © 2001 by David Pirie. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  First published in Great Britain by Century,

  Random House Group Limited

  eISBN 9781429979405

  First eBook Edition : May 2011

  First U.S. Edition: May 2002