I mumbled a barely civil reply. “How are you so sure that it is my wife who was lost?”
“It is written all over you.”
“It is not,” I snapped.
“Forgive me, monsieur, but it is.” He drew a breath and considered a moment longer. He looked wearied by his years, but there was a spark of something in his eyes as he began to speak. “It is an exceptionally chilly May this year and you are wearing the greatcoat you wore this past winter. The coat is an obvious favorite of yours, as it shows extensive wear. It is quite weather-stained, however there is a band on the arm that is slightly less faded. It is the size and placement equal to a mourning band. Had the death been that of a colleague or acquaintance it would not have been worn so long, but the difference in weathering speaks to an extended use. A beloved family member seems likely.”
“You said it was my wife,” I said tightly. “Not a parent or a child. Surely an extended period of grief would be appropriate in either case.”
“It would, but the weathering is not the only telltale sign. The polish of your shoes is professional, clearly done by a bootblack who was once a military man. He even uses the same brushes—or, the same type of brush—with which he was familiar during service. A wife would use one of the commercial brushes that are popular on the market, but the density of bristles would be different. Commercial brushes are softer, and there is a different quality to the ink used in the polish. No, you have had to go out to have your shoes tended to.”
“Many men frequent bootblacks,” I said, “and there are countless veterans in that trade.”
“There are,” he conceded, “but it is one point. Allow me to finish, yes? Returning to your coat, it has been brushed by an indifferent hand. The strokes are brisk to the point of harshness but they are not thorough. There are fragments of leaf debris from trees not found in this green park. I see two types of decorative oaks of the kind that are more common in the courtyards of public buildings. Such trees grow near Scotland Yard, among other places.”
I said nothing, but I could feel my hands clutching slowly into fists.
“Your hat is similarly brushed, and I do not believe a wife would allow a husband to venture forth in such a state. I could go on and mention the state of your cuffs and the fact that one of the threads that had been used to secure the mourning band in place still lingers on your sleeve, but I will relent. No, monsieur, it is your wife who has left us, and again I offer my condolences on your loss, Doctor.”
“How do you know that I am a doctor?”
He nodded toward the Gladstone. “That alone is suggestive. However, there are three small stains upon the back of your right shirt cuff which I perceive are iodine. As the stains are faded to different degrees it suggests that you have used the antiseptic with some frequency over a period of days. Few people outside of the medical profession would carry such stains upon their clothes. The fact that you have not changed your shirt in that time is also suggestive, and reinforces my deduction that you are a widower. You have no wife to attend to you and you seldom return to the house you shared with her, likely because of the pain it inflicts. Such a man in such a state might well bury himself in his professional duties, going day upon day without pausing to refresh and change clothes. You have, however, shaved recently, which is something that can be done in your own surgery or at a club, so you are not so deep into despair that you have abandoned all pride. That and the removal of your mourning band tell me that enough time has passed that you are beginning—but are not far into—a period of recovery from grief. ”
“You toy with me, sir,” I said, rising sharply to my feet. “You pretend to deduce these things when in fact you already know who I am and what I have lost.”
“I know these things now,” he said, “but I swear that I did not know it until a minute ago—of this I can assure you, Doctor Watson.”
“My name was on my papers,” I protested, but he shook his head.
“I saw only the topmost page on which was what I took to be a personal letter on common foolscap. I did not read past the first two lines, which appeared to continue an account of a murdered chimney sweep.”
On that score he was correct, as I now remembered. The case files I had been reviewing concerned an odd matter involving a poisoned Christmas gift and a missing soot brush. Holmes had solved the case but had asked me to withhold its publication as there were elements that would compromise a noted and much admired opera soprano. I opened my bag and studied the page to verify that no one—neither I nor Holmes—was named therein. There were no names at all on that page, nor on the next, and there had not been enough time for the old man to have read further. I closed the bag and resumed my place on the bench.
“If you know who I am,” I said, my anger back on its leash, “then you know whose grave this is.”
“I do,” said he. “That is the headstone erected on the empty grave of the late Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street.”
“It is.”
“Just so. However, it did not immediately tell me who you were. Your identity, monsieur, became apparent as I observed you, your belongings, and heard you speak. The rest—the sad news of your wife’s passing—were facts about which I was entirely ignorant prior to our meeting. Deductions of that kind are child’s play, and if my playing such a game has offended you, once more I apologize. Sadly, it would not be the first time I have been accused of being inhuman in my interactions with people. A failing in some views, though I hold a contrary opinion.”
I did not rise to the challenge of that statement and instead demanded of him his name. The old man braced his hands on the bench and, with great apparent effort, pushed himself to a standing position. He was not particularly tall or imposing, and would not have been so even if he was a younger man, but there was something compelling about him nonetheless. He carried a weight of authority with him, which I have seldom encountered before except in my late friend, his brother, Mycroft, and a select few notables.
“Doctor Watson,” he said in a formal tone, “allow me to properly introduce myself. I am Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, late of Paris, and it is my pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
To say that I was flummoxed would be to understate my reaction. Once more I felt my anger rise. Had he not been old and frail, I would have thrashed him roundly and kicked him like a dog. He could no doubt see the anger on my face, for my cheeks burned with heat. His dark eyes twinkled with amusement and it took a very great effort of will not to spew at him the bilious words that formed on my tongue.
He nodded and sat down. “Yes, I see that I have done my credibility no service by admitting the truth of my identity.”
“Auguste Dupin does not exist,” I snapped. “He is entirely a product of fiction.”
“Do I appear to you to be a thing composed of nothing but ink and paper? Am I a dream, Doctor, or do you assert that I am nothing but the product of the fevered imagination of a drunken fool of an American writer? And a dead writer at that?”
“Of course not.”
“Nor a ghost met by ill chance in a graveyard?” He smiled and tipped his hat to the golden sun. “Though a strange and singular phantom would I be, were I capable of haunting you on so bright a day.”
“Neither phantom nor fiction,” I said, “but a man who has either taken leave of his senses, or who possesses a brand of humor that is both crude and ill-considered.”
“Neither of those things, I assure you,” he said. “My name is Dupin and if M. Poe has convinced the world that he created me out of whole cloth, then that is to the best.”
“In what possible way?”
“You are no doubt familiar with the lurid tales penned by the late Poe?”
“‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’” I said irritably, “and two or three others.”
“Two,” the old man corrected. “Badly written fantasies at best.”
“Come now, sir, this joke has gone far enough, and is in the poorest taste.”
> “It is no joke, Doctor,” he said.
“You claim that you are a detective, then?”
He bristled. “I do not. Nor do I appreciate that label. I am a gentleman from a good family and am proud to be a member of the Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur. Only a cad and scoundrel would claim such an honor falsely, and it is one thing in life I do not take lightly.”
“But Dupin was a fictional character!” I cried. “Everyone knows this.”
“Do they?”
“Sherlock Holmes and I have discussed Dupin on many occasions, as each of us had read the fiction in which that character appears.” I recalled quite vividly the conversation I had with Holmes on this very topic when we first met. When I observed that his methods called to mind Poe’s Dupin, Holmes said, with some asperity, ‘No doubt you think you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin. Now in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.’
I did not recount my friend’s words, but instead restated that Auguste Dupin was conjured entirely from the imagination of a writer of fiction and had no other reality.
“Is Holmes an equally literary phantom?” countered the old man.
“Holmes is—was—a real person and I had the very great honor to serve as his biographer,” I said indignantly. “Or at least I attempted to do so, though I admit to my own shortcomings as a writer.”
“No,” he said, “you are quite an acceptable writer, although I will go as far as to say that it is clear you do not fully grasp the subtleties of either the deductive or inductive process of observation, analysis, and assessment. For my part, however, I was briefly acquainted with M. Poe when I was much younger, though he was more closely associated with a dear friend of mine. I fear my friend—who bears some great similarities to you, I will admit—was wont to share intimacies. Drink, you know. A fine fellow in his way, but he had no head for wine. Not after the second bottle. He and Poe beguiled many an evening in salons, and it was there, I learned later, that my friend shared the details of some . . . er, matters . . . with which I was involved.”
“You mean the matter of the stolen letter, the grotesque situation with the ape, and the woman found floating in the river?” I said, and I could feel my anger transforming by slow degrees into astonishment, even fascination.
“Indeed,” said Dupin—for now I was coming to think of him as that person in truth. “Though if you have read those fictions—I cannot in truth credit them as objective accounts—then you will be aware that M. Poe tended to embellish in favor of hyperbole and dramatic flair. He could not be chased away from superlatives, the scoundrel. He would err on the side of style—God help us—when a cold, unemphatic statement of the bare facts would have been both more accurate and more exciting to the intellectual mind.”
I said nothing. Holmes had many times criticized me for much the same faults.
“If you are who you say you are,” I said, “how is it that you are here, in this cemetery and on a bench beside this grave?”
He smiled again, but this time there was a guarded, even mysterious, quality to it. “I was drawn here.”
“Drawn by what? Or by whom?”
He reached into his pocket and withdrew an envelope, tapped it thoughtfully against his chin for a moment, then handed it to me. I accepted it and noted that the paper was remarkably crisp and expensive, but of a kind unknown to me. It was addressed to M. C.A. Dupin in the Faubourg Saint Germain, a section of Paris known for expensive townhouses of the hôtel particulier variety. The envelope was unsealed. At Dupin’s encouragement I opened it and removed a folded sheet of onionskin, and discovered that a flower had been enclosed within the page. It was a delicate but faded specimen of a dried flower, with white petals with slender green filaments and anthers of a startling blue. I gaped at the flower, for had I not gathered up a handful of the same blossoms only moments ago? Dupin watched me as I stood, walked over to the grave, and knelt to compare the dried example with its freshly cut cousins.
I glanced at him. “What flower is this? What does it mean, that it was both sent to you and scattered on Holmes’s grave?”
“It is very curious,” he said. “What do you make of it?”
“Nothing,” I confessed as I returned and reclaimed my seat. “It is a flower and nothing more.”
“You do not recognize the variety?”
“Not at all. It seems familiar,” I said, “but I am no botanist. Perhaps a flower seller might know.”
“I have consulted several,” said Dupin. “Eight, to be precise, and only the eighth was able to identify this flower, but barely so. He recommended that I pursue the matter further with a learned professor of botany at the Institut de France, which of course I did. The professor was able to identify it, but only after consulting several books. There was only a single example of it in his cases, the flower is so rare. He remarked that it was unusual for such a thing to be found anywhere in Paris, and I have since confirmed that it us utterly unknown here in London except to botanists at the Royal Society.”
“And yet I have seen it,” I cried, “and in bloom, though I cannot for the life of me recall where it was.”
His eyes pierced me with their intensity. “Can you not, Doctor?”
“No. I seldom take particular note of flowers. The odd rose or carnation, perhaps, but . . .”
Dupin was shaking his head in obvious disapproval. “Take a moment before you decide that you have never taken note of this flower before. What can you tell about it by pure observation?”
I suppressed a sigh. Dupin clearly possessed some of the same intellectual qualities as my late friend, but he also had a fair few of the less appealing habits that apparently are part and parcel. Superiority and condescension, not the least.
“It is similar to a common edelweiss,” I said slowly. “That much is obvious, for that flower is common in the better flower shops, but it is also unlike one.”
“How so?”
“It is smaller and far more delicate than that flower. And the colors do not quite match any example I’ve seen.”
“Very good. It is indeed a species of Leontopodium alpinum,” he agreed, “but it is a very rare subspecies. The professor at the Institut says that this particular flower grows only in one place on Earth.”
“And where is that?”
Dupin looked mildly surprised. “You truly do not know?”
“I confess that I am unable to connect this flower with my memory of where I saw it. Perhaps it was in a book.”
“Or,” he said, “perhaps you were emotionally distraught at the time.”
I bristled. “If you are suggesting, sir, that this flower was presented to me as a token of sympathy when my wife—”
Dupin held up a hand to stop my outburst. “No, no, not at all. Dear me, I seem unable to do anything but offend you. If I were a younger man I daresay you would attempt to thrash me for this and other perceived slights.”
“I made no such threat,” I said at once.
“No, but you cannot say that it did not occur to you, at least as a wistful lament that my age and infirmity stand between you and a burst of violence that would, at least, make you feel better in the moment.”
“You are being rude, sir.”
“I am often perceived as such, Doctor, but surely you of all people can recognize that a statement made based on observation, insight, and logical supposition stands apart from—and perhaps above—the niceties of common conversation. Your many accounts of the investigations of your late friend build a case in support of my point. Even Poe was keen enough to perceive that much.”
I said nothing, not trusting my voice.
Dupin offered another small bow. “Nevertheless, Doctor Watson, allow me once more to apologize. I inte
nded no reference to your late wife. No, monsieur, not at all. My intention was only to provoke thought and memory, not pain.”
“Then perhaps,” I said tightly, “such a process might benefit from more straightforward statements rather than cryptic questions or obscure remarks.”
He laughed. “Mon dieu, doctor, but you remind me of an old friend, long passed, who often said as much to me. And I will confess that to a logician in a world of those who do not prize rational and informed analysis, a sense of drama is perhaps inevitable. An ugly and even cheap habit, to be sure, but I never claimed to be a saint among men. Nor, I suspect, did your late friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. His love of drama was well known. Were his death faked and he alive, I would not put it past him to break the grassy sod upon his grave and spring forth with a dramatic flair. And the world who, through your writings, came to adore him, would think it all a fine performance worthy of ovation.”
“What a vile thing to say!”
“Would you claim that Holmes never fooled you in some cruel way if it served his love of the dramatic revelation? How would you feel if a conductor on a train or a beggar on the street suddenly revealed himself to be none other than your friend, not dead but quite alive? Would that not be in keeping with M. Holmes’s theatricality?”
“There were limits,” I said, “even for him.”
“Indeed,” said Dupin diffidently. “Perhaps I am in error.”
“I believe you are, sir.”
“Then you will have another apology from me.”
“No,” I snapped, “I don’t want another apology. What I want is an answer to your riddle about the edelweiss.”
“Ah.”
“You say I should know this particular species of that flower. Tell me your thoughts on that, because a graveyard is an ill place for a child’s guessing game.”
He rose again and bent carefully to pick up one of the flowers from the bouquet on the grave, then came back and held it up so that we could both see it. I joined him.
“First,” he said, “I will tell you a bit of history.”
“More drama?”
Echoes of Sherlock Holmes Page 31
