Mycroft Holmes

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  “Yes, your engagement!” Emanuel repeated with growing enthusiasm. “I knew that in the midst of all this tragedy, there was a bit of good news. There I was, leaving the post office with your mail, and your fiancée, she was at the counter, asking about it, just as I was walking out. Ah, such a lovely voice! Like a little bird tweeting.”

  “What did she look like?” Douglas prompted.

  “She looked like a beautiful woman,” Emanuel declared with certainty. “She was at the counter, and I heard her say your name, and I heard her identify herself, and that you had asked her to fetch your post. So I say to her, ‘Missus!’ I say. ‘I have them,’ and I pulled them out from under my hat, thusly!”

  He mimed the motion.

  “And I gave them to her,” he continued, “there and then. Oh, she was so grateful. She kissed me on the cheek. Here!”

  He pointed to the spot.

  Holmes stepped forward. “Emanuel. Please. What did she look like?”

  “Pretty, I said,” Emanuel repeated. “Blond! And young… too young for you, Douglas,” he added with a wink, accompanied by a dark and toothless grin. “She wrapped them in a neat purple bow.”

  Douglas stared at Emanuel, then at Holmes, mystified.

  “Cyrus?” Emanuel asked.

  “Yes?” Douglas said, distracted, turning back to him.

  “I think I shall go lie down again a little.”

  “No, old man, it’s getting cold. One more moment, and I’ll take you home.”

  Douglas turned to Holmes again. “But if she had the letters, then why this?” he asked, and he indicated the destruction all around him.

  It took Holmes a moment of contemplation, a moment when the noise around him ceased, and he was alone in the depths of his mind, which appeared to him like gears endlessly turning. Everything he knew about Georgiana, about her character, about her ideals, sifted through.

  Out came a hunch that made him feel both prescient and emotionally destroyed. He hurried over to the metal flue that was attached to the pot-bellied stove, tore it off of its foundation with unnecessary force, as it was no longer anchored to anything of substance, and dug around inside the tubing.

  Along with soot and cinders, out came a packet of letters. The envelopes were blackened by smoke and curled with heat, but otherwise undamaged.

  They were still wrapped in a neat purple bow.

  Douglas’s eyes were as round as two large coals.

  “What on earth…” he began, but Holmes shook his head.

  “I realize my feelings for her are absurd,” he said quietly. “She is a monster, after all.”

  “You think Georgiana put them in there?” Douglas asked, astonished.

  Holmes shrugged. “Who else?”

  “What, is this a game with her?” Douglas shot back angrily.

  “No,” Holmes replied. “I think she is in over her head, and does not know how to get out.”

  “Ah, I see! She conspires in the murders of children, of adults, now she is rethinking it.”

  “Who conspires?” Emanuel interjected meekly. “Your fiancée? Douglas, is she a bad girl?”

  The sun had set and a light wind was beginning to blow, lifting the cinders.

  The old man was starting to shiver.

  He looks as if the thread of his life is ready to be cut, Holmes thought.

  “Emanuel,” Douglas said, wrapping a protective arm around his shoulders. “I will take you home now, as I promised.”

  “You cannot think of leaving now,” Holmes protested, holding up the bundle. “Not when we have these in hand!”

  “There is a living creature here that I am responsible for,” Douglas murmured through gritted teeth.

  Holmes waved the packet of letters in the air.

  “And who knows how many other living creatures might be saved if only we could suss this out,” he countered.

  “You are being irrational,” Douglas shot back. “We are in ashes, and losing the light. How do you propose we read these precious letters?”

  Holmes ran an exasperated hand through his hair and seemed ready to answer back in kind.

  “Forgive me, Douglas,” he said after a moment. “You are correct, of course. It seems I am mortified that my carelessness has added to your sorrows—”

  Emanuel interrupted.

  “Ah, my boys, is it a place of refuge you are seeking, then?”

  “Yes, Emanuel,” Douglas said patiently. “For you. The night is growing chilly.”

  “But I have a place here, Douglas,” the old man declared. “It is not as spacious as your house was, as it is only one room, but it is large enough, with four sweet-smelling straw beds, hardly used, though we require but three. I have my own pot-bellied stove, and a stall for the horses, and hay…”

  “I realize that,” Douglas interjected, “but it saddens you to stay there.”

  Emanuel shook his head.

  “If you remain with me,” he said earnestly, “if you will not leave me alone, I can survive it one night. It will almost be as when you were little, hey, Cyrus? And you would stop by for Mariana’s ginger-blossom tea. Do you remember?”

  “Indeed I do,” Douglas replied softly.

  “He loved my wife’s tea,” he explained to Holmes. “Always such a good little boy. So well behaved.”

  “We would be honored to stay with you tonight,” Douglas said, squeezing the old man’s shoulder.

  “Good, good.” Emanuel smiled, clapping his hands. “Then it is done! And perhaps soon you will introduce me officially to your fiancée. Eh?”

  Douglas and Holmes glanced at each other, dismayed.

  “She is not my fiancée,” Douglas explained patiently.

  “I know, I know,” Emanuel said somberly. “It is not so easy for one of our kind…” The old man rubbed his skin with a forefinger. “…to marry an Englishwoman. Times have changed, but not so much, eh? Well hush, then. Let it be our secret for now. Perhaps some day, people will not see color so much.”

  Douglas nodded. “Perhaps,” he said.

  29

  EMANUEL’S HUT HAD ONE SMALL WINDOW FACING WESTWARD TO the sea, but was set so high up that the view was all sky and no water. It was grimy with soot, and its top hinge was missing so that it could no longer be pried open.

  There was a pot-bellied stove, but its front grate had been torn off, and it hadn’t had a good scrubbing in years. The room itself was nearly empty but for a deal table and three splintered old chairs, a wooden chaise that looked like an instrument of medieval torture, and four mattresses with straw stuffing so old that some of it actually stood up in sharp little needles.

  The mattresses themselves weren’t quite so sweet-smelling as promised. Holmes could smell them from the moment he walked in—and “sweet” would have been nowhere in the description.

  Yet the old man was kind and seemed very glad for the company. He generously filled his lamps with enough oil that they could have burned for a month. Then he expertly lit the stove and stood back, admiring his handiwork as the ancient old receptacle coughed plumes of smoke that painted another layer of soot upon that small high window and turned the room into a sweltering oven.

  But creature comforts mattered not a whit to Holmes. He was anxious only about the letters. He blew dust off the deal table and took a seat.

  Douglas, after ascertaining that Emanuel did not need his help, pulled up a chair across from Holmes, when the old man called out from across the room.

  “I have no beer or wine,” he said despairingly.

  “That won’t be necessary!” Douglas called back.

  “Ah, you’ll be playing cards, then. Hearts?” he guessed, squinting at them while removing his shoes.

  “Now what prompted that idea?” Douglas asked.

  Emanuel cocked his head, confused. “What other reason to sit up then, eh? When the beds are so comfortable? Here!”

  He toddled over to one mattress, one with a particularly prominent hump, and sat upon it. Then
he demonstrated how to stretch out upon one’s back, as if neither man had ever attempted such a daring feat before.

  “There, you see? I do not even need a pillow,” he announced proudly. “Which is handy, as I have none. You simply lie here quietly…”

  “If you are going to sleep,” Douglas scolded, watching him, “kindly do not take the worst bed of the lot.”

  “And you will kindly be quiet before your elders!” Emanuel snapped. “Now, then,” he continued as if in the midst of some difficult lesson. He pulled a moth-eaten blanket around him, up to his neck. “You simply close your eyes… thus…”

  Within seconds, he was snoring lightly.

  * * *

  Douglas took the packet of letters from Holmes and cut open the first two envelopes, both of which bore a postmark from Honduras, both sent by the same correspondent, but five days apart.

  As he scanned them, Holmes watched him expectantly, and after a moment began to drum his fingertips on the tabletop.

  “I am too practical,” he said, “to believe that somewhere in that stack lies the answer to all our problems.”

  “Far from it,” Douglas replied sourly, “at least judging from these. They say nothing beyond the usual niceties. ‘All is well,’ not to be outdone by ‘all is still well’…” He pushed the first two letters aside and tore open the third envelope, this one hailing from Jamaica.

  “Might you include me from the first salutation?” Holmes asked drily. “For if not, I shall surely go mad.”

  At which point Douglas began translating aloud.

  “‘My dear Cyrus,’” he said. “‘You shall be pleased to know that our little island has seen a rather peaceful month…’”

  Holmes laughed mirthlessly.

  “We are not pleased in the least,” he said.

  That letter, too, was shoved aside in favor of the fourth and the fifth. Holmes’s hopes to the contrary, these were no more productive. Douglas showed his disdain by balling up both and lobbing them neatly into the stove’s open maw.

  By the time he’d reached the sixth envelope—this one hailing from Venezuela—it bore the brunt of his growing annoyance.

  “Careful!” Holmes cried. “You nearly cut the letter in twain!”

  Douglas scanned it with disgust.

  “It says nothing,” he muttered darkly. “The usual ‘we hope your family is well and your business is thriving’—certainly not the sort of information one would torch a house to quell…”

  He paused, and frowned, squinting over the letter.

  “Although this,” he mumbled, “I have no notion of…” Then his voice trailed off, and his frown deepened.

  “What is it?” Holmes pressed.

  Douglas translated:

  “‘Men of genteel but profitable employment, whom we have not seen in two decades or more, are now at our ports—’”

  “What does he mean, ‘at our ports’?” Holmes interrupted.

  “Caracas,” Douglas said distractedly, then continued. “‘And they are wishing to repurchase merchandise at its former market value.’” He paused, then said, “What sort of merchandise could he mean?”

  Holmes suddenly leaned forward in his chair.

  “What is it…?” Douglas asked, eyeing him curiously.

  “Dear heavens, Douglas. Keep reading!” he sputtered.

  “Why? What do you infer from this?”

  “Come, come, man—I grant that your supplier is being diplomatic to the point of cryptic, but, having worked in a war office, I am well versed in cryptic,” Holmes exclaimed. “I am certain that the poor sod is too frightened to do more than hint.”

  “Frightened of what?”

  “You know perfectly well what—”

  “HOLMES!”

  Douglas thundered his friend’s name so loudly that Emanuel, lying in his bed, twitched and snorted, before drifting off to sleep once again.

  “Whatever is the matter?” Holmes bleated.

  “You must keep me apprised as we go along,” Douglas blurted out. “God’s teeth, man, you can make anyone feel like an idiot.”

  “Apprised?” Holmes stammered. “Why, of course! You needn’t bellow, we are partners in this, are we not?”

  Douglas leaned across the table.

  “Perhaps it has not been made sufficiently clear to you,” he countered tersely, “but someone has burned down my home to destroy this!” He waved the letter inches from Holmes’s face. “This endless litany of ‘we trust your family is well,’” he continued, “has cost my family and myself dearly. So, if you discern something of worth, pray tell me without a trace of smugness.” He sat back and crossed his arms at the waist. “Because at the moment I cannot bear it.”

  “Smugness?” Holmes replied. “I am not remotely smug! But does ‘genteel employment’ suggest nothing to you?”

  Douglas took a moment to breathe. He acknowledged to himself—not for the first time—that arguing with Holmes was useless. That he’d do what he would, and heaven take the hindmost.

  “Genteel employment,” he mused. “I suppose it reminds me of ‘the genteel trade’.”

  “There you have it!” Holmes declared.

  Douglas blanched.

  “You are referring to slaves?” he asked, incredulous, as if the very notion might spring out and bite him. “You think that slaves are the ‘merchandise’ of which they speak?”

  “What else could they be speaking of?”

  “Holmes,” Douglas said, as evenly as he could manage. “I realize you are given to far-fetched notions…”

  “All of which have been proven true thus far,” Holmes reminded him.

  “But this letter hails from Venezuela. The slave trade has been banned there for twenty-six years.”

  “Nevertheless, we are on to something,” Holmes insisted. “Pray, keep reading. I have an inkling that this is the first major opportunity we have had.”

  30

  THE SEVENTH MISSIVE, HAILING FROM PORTUGAL, SUBTLY confirmed the one from Venezuela. It was more overt, referring to the slavers as “men of the genteel trade,” and it ascertained that, after a good long absence, they’d suddenly begun appearing openly at various ports of call that had once been part of their routes.

  “‘Employment in the Caribbean is scarce, as you are aware,’” Douglas read, “‘and merchandise tends to stay put.’” He looked up. “I assume that means ex-slaves continue to work for their former owners, there being no other work to be had.”

  Holmes, who was fanning himself with letter number one, nodded.

  “‘In exchange for a moment’s distraction, merchandise is appropriated for three hundred British pounds per unit,’” Douglas read.

  He stared at Holmes.

  “So past owners are asked to identify not only the former slave, but his or her whereabouts, so that the slavers may kidnap them—to the tune of three hundred pounds per head. Three hundred per head…” he repeated, whistling.

  Abruptly he rose and began inspecting Emanuel’s drawers and shelves.

  Holmes stared at him askance for a moment.

  “What the deuce are you searching for?”

  “Ah, thank heavens,” Douglas gasped. From out of the recesses of an otherwise bare shelf, he pulled out a little brown burlap pouch of shag tobacco, along with a sheet of yellowed rolling papers. The tobacco was nearly as old as the straw in the old man’s mattresses, but Holmes was every bit as glad to see it as was Douglas to have found it.

  Both men rolled it up quickly, set it afire, and inhaled greedily.

  “Brilliant notion, Douglas,” Holmes complimented him after a long exhalation. “Helps one to think.”

  “It never occurred to me that you might need assistance in that regard,” Douglas replied. “In any case, with the sugar and cocoa trades struggling, three hundred British pounds per head would, unfortunately, be wildly tempting to just about anyone.”

  He took a puff of the cigarette and exhaled the acrid smoke.

  “
On the other hand, it makes economic sense only to the seller,” he mused. “Half of the twelve million slaves ‘imported’ from Africa were brought here, to the Caribbean. That’s quite a bit of ‘merchandise’ for the slavers to repurchase, and for an awful lot of money. Imagine how long it would take to contact every former slave owner in—”

  “Six years,” Holmes interjected.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “It would take six years to contact them all.”

  “So you are saying they began this process six years ago?” Douglas ventured.

  “I said no such thing,” Holmes exclaimed, “and they are certainly not planning to kidnap six million former slaves. No, if they receive an affirmative from even one in one hundred previous owners…”

  Douglas shook his head no.

  “I realize maths is your forte, Holmes,” he declared, “and not necessarily mine, but that is still sixty thousand former slaves they would be proposing to pay for, and then kidnap—which would be a chore in and of itself. And while it’s true that some people consider the Negro expendable,” he continued, “sixty thousand human beings vanishing into the ether may attract a bit of notice.”

  “Yes,” Holmes admitted, “the monetary sum would be sheer folly, and the logistics of the kidnappings? Untenable, as you said. So, while our discovery is certainly momentous in nature, what we need now is direction.”

  Douglas stared down at the last envelope. It bore no postmark.

  “Perhaps it contains a map,” he suggested, only half joking. He tore it open, but there was no map inside, and no letter. Instead, there was the gleaming illustration of a steamship, with the words “seeds and machinery” penned above it in a printed hand that neither man recognized.

  Holmes looked it over.

  “It seems self-evident that the slaves would be transported by ship,” he said. “That isn’t the sort of revelation we need. And there’s nothing here to indicate what the final destination would be.”

  “‘Seeds and machinery,’” Douglas quoted. “Any ship that carries seeds and machinery, regardless of the other cargo, is protected as a commercial vessel and is immune from search and seizure.”