The Case of the Swan in the Fog

by A S Croyle

  The Case of the Swan in the Fog

  Book Three in the ‘Before Watson’ Series

  By

  A. S. Croyle

  Published in the UK by

  MX Publishing

  335 Princess Park Manor

  Royal Drive, London, N11 3GX

  www.mxpublishing.co.uk

  Digital edition converted and distributed by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  © Copyright 2017 A.S.Croyle

  The right of A.S.Croyle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.

  All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious or used fictitiously. Except for certain historical personages, any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not of MX Publishing.

  Cover design by Brian Belanger

  Big Barges full of yellow hay

  Are moored against the shadowy wharf,

  And, like a yellow silken scarf,

  The thick fog hangs along the quay

  -Oscar Wilde, Symphony in Yellow

  Prologue

  June 8, 1944

  The fog of war is lifting and hope, a feather perched in my soul, rises from its darkened chamber.

  I thought of Sherlock Holmes, who would have rejoiced at the news, and it brought tears to my eyes. I wish he were here with me, listening to the good tidings on the BBC.

  We have just learned that in early June, the United States and Great Britain assembled the largest number of soldiers and the greatest amount of equipment ever to launch and sustain an amphibious attack. Hour by hour, we hear accounts of the acts of heroism on the beaches of Normandy where the Allied forces invaded occupied Western Europe.

  I had to smile when my dear brother, Dr. Michael Stamford - the man who introduced Sherlock Holmes to Dr. John Watson - rushed into my room, nearly losing his footing. Leaning on his cane, his voice quivering, he said, “Poppy, look at this!” as he handed me the financial edition with its front-page headline: Tone Commendably Calm on War News. Was a more British headline ever written?

  I scanned the article quickly. The article began by stating, “The Stock Exchange took the news of the long-expected invasion of the Continent with commendable calmness.” I could not help but be amused by the use of such phrases as “fairly busy,” “inclined to dry up” and “understandably quiet” in front page reporting. The stories in other papers were a bit more dramatic. One article stated that “June 7th dawns with the allies securely in control of all five beach heads.” Another report in The Evening Standard said that Churchill “announced the successful massed air landings behind enemy lines.” That story went on to describe the landing of four thousand ships and eleven thousand aircraft - “flying fortresses” bombing the beach.

  Soon my grandson will be coming home. We received word that he was wounded, and we do not know the extent of his injuries, but I am hopeful, that, like Sherlock Holmes’ faithful companion John Watson, the damage, both physical and emotional, will not be too great for him to resume the practice of medicine.

  As I look out my bedroom window, however, I see another fog rolling in... and it is a reminder of days gone by, of the fogs that covered my beloved London in the past, smothering it and granting camouflage for criminals. Even my dear friend Oscar Wilde wrote about the awful, moving beast that shut out the sun in our fair city.

  The fog never stopped Sherlock Holmes. He could unearth any clue and bring light to darkness. He entered the world to purge evil from London, to pounce on the beasts of the city’s underbelly with his fresh ideas, his unorthodox methods, and a gentle, wordless expectation that his opinions would be taken as gospel. He moved through the world alone, trying to snuff out the grim and imaginative cruelties that man visits upon man. But he did let me in for just a little while. For a short time, we entered an unwritten sacrosanct contract, with Sherlock as Don Quixote and me as his Sancho. Then again, Sherlock tilted no windmills. He was born to slay dragons.

  Sherlock Holmes kept secrets, even from Dr. Watson, his friend and biographer. Secrets about his friendship with my brother Michael who introduced Watson to Sherlock, secrets about himself, and definitely secrets about me and my involvement in many of his early cases. I am quite certain Dr. Watson never knew about the time Sherlock and I spent together in the Broads or that we designed a little sailing vessel, a replica of which Sherlock left me under the terms of his Last Will and Testament. I am sure Dr. Watson never knew about our affection for one another or about my long struggle to shed the heavy weight of my love for him. These were secrets Sherlock took to his grave.

  I finally summoned the courage to part ways with Sherlock, to go on without him in my life, only because I had no choice. Ultimately, the relationship was unsustainable. I walked away from him over sixty years ago because I discovered it was easier to bury my feelings than to carry them around like a stone on my back. I struggled for years to carve out a new life far away from him, and the burden diminished; its consistency gradually went from a mantle of marble to a warm blanket to a gauzy veil.

  But I kept up with his adventures. I read Dr. Watson’s accounts of how Sherlock continued to try to transform London into a magic city of permanent peace.

  But, oh, had he succeeded, how very bored he would have been.

  For the first time since I learned of the bombing of Pearl Harbour, I am optimistic enough to set pen to paper as I turn my thoughts again to Sherlock. I shall set aside my fears and once again pause to reflect upon the happier - albeit frustrating and confusing - times of my youth when Sherlock and I meandered the streets of his beloved London, long before the bombs and shelters, before the breaking glass and shattered lives. I shall let my mind move through itself, looping back to those burnished memories, to those reflections and dreams that I had tried to tuck away. I shall re-create that short-lived, long-ago idyll that we shared when I tossed away reason and gave way to emotions.

  I remain to this day somewhat overwhelmed with the pain of loss, for I never quite recognized myself after we parted, and I could never quite reconcile ‘Before Sherlock’ with ‘After Sherlock.’ The pendulum would swing back and forth. Even after all these years, even as I approach the age of ninety and the end of my life, I am as perplexed as ever about the rejection - his of me and mine of him.

  But everything between still sparkles

  Chapter 1

  25 December 1879

  Christmas Day 1879 was attended with nocturnal darkness in London. My parents would later tell me that even in the Broads of Norfolk from which I hail, the fog was remarkably thick throughout the day there as well.

  I should have liked to share the festivities with my parents at our home, Burleigh Manor. My Aunt Susan, her ward, little Billy - the baby brother of one of Sherlock’s homeless messengers - and my nephew, Alistair Alexander were there. I longed to be there to watch Alexander open gifts and to gaze at his joyful countenance; he so resembled his mother, my brother’s late wife, my best friend Eff
ie.

  As doctors, we were needed in London. My brother Michael and my uncle, Dr. Ormond Sacker, both physicians at St. Bart’s, had decided to forego the holiday celebration in the Broads, as had I. A great fog had sneaked into London, covering her with a thick and ominous blanket, the blackest fog I ever saw. It was causing hundreds of people to become deathly ill. That very Christmas morning, Uncle had been summoned to treat the seventy-eight-year-old mother of the First Earl of Kimberly, John Wodehouse. Though she bore her illness with great fortitude, Uncle feared the worst. Disease and injuries caused by the fog had fairly devastated the city.

  Sherlock had sent one of his homeless boys, whom he used as messengers and who helped him gather information, with a note in which he requested that I meet him “immediately at Bart’s.” Certain that my medical office was empty as it usually was, and worried that Sherlock might be ill, I made my way from Regent’s Park, where I resided with Uncle Ormond and Aunt Susan, to St. Paul’s. The entire time my face was masked in a thick wool scarf.

  I stopped for a few moments to pray, and then continued on my way, crossing Newgate into Giltspur Street until I reached St. Bart’s Hospital.

  I stopped to chat with Michael in the hallway but just for a moment. “Is he ill?” I asked.

  “No, he’s in the lab. Must be off, darling,” Michael said.

  “He” was Sherlock Holmes.

  A bit miffed at the summons, I made my way to the lab. Sherlock was looking out the window. He did not turn around when I entered. As I removed my hat, scarf, cape and gloves, he said, “It’s like a brown mass, isn’t it, Stamford? Rising and hanging like a still, thick curtain between the world and the sky. It blots out the sun and the moon. I suppose this is rather propitious to amatory encounters. I’m told that the nymphs of the pave do unusually good business in this weather. Even I could be bold, perforce leave off my work and for a shilling or two accost a petticoat. If I were so inclined,” he added.

  I felt myself blush.

  “Of course, for my young friend Archie, it’s rather a good atmosphere for grave robbing as well,” he continued.

  The ‘Archie’ to whom he referred was Archibald William Wiggins, the oldest of the homeless boys who ran errands for Sherlock, but he was known on the streets as Bill Wiggins. His little brother Billy now resided, off and on, with my Uncle Ormond and Aunt Susan because the boys’ mother was unreliable, but Wiggins refused to completely relinquish his place in Billy’s life. Sherlock often said he hoped to turn little Billy into a proper page one day.

  “This dense fog chokes our fair city, Stamford,” Sherlock sighed. “The blacks cover and obscure everything from view. Very bad for the bees, you know. The damnable flying particles of soot settle everywhere. London stinks of the coal age.

  “I would wager the casualty department here is filled with victims today. Omnibus and cab accidents,” he said, still staring out the window. “I heard someone say that a man driving a horse and gig toward town ran up against a granite wall and was thrown with great force upon the footpath. Another man ran into a shop window on St. James and broke upward of forty squares of glass. The other night, some drunkards ended up falling into the Thames and drowned. I am surprised we have not heard of another collision on the river, like the one at Vauxhall Bridge or the Princess Alice sinking.”

  I cringed, remembering the terrible collision on the Thames River the previous year when the Princess Alice, a paddle-boat steamer, was cut in half by a large cargo ship.

  “But London is never swathed in ordinary darkness, is she?” he added as he turned around. Seeing me, he exclaimed, “Poppy! What are you doing here?”

  “You sent for me, Sherlock.”

  “Where did your brother go? I was just speaking to him.”

  “He left several minutes ago, Sherlock. It is I who heard your soliloquy.”

  “Michael left?” he asked, a puzzled expression on his face. “I did not notice.”

  Of course, he didn’t. Sherlock often went into a world of his own, delving so deeply into his brain attic that he did not realize the person to whom he had been speaking had left the room. This eccentricity had increased of late. He was getting more cases, solving each crime with breathtaking rapidity, and he had so suppressed his emotions that whatever remnants of them that were left were deeply tucked away and rarely revealed.

  “Pea soup. The entire city is like pea soup. Brown and greenish and smoky and so dark that vehicles over in Piccadilly keep running into each other,” he mumbled, as he walked over to the counter and settled behind his microscope.

  “I must ask you about Wiggins, Sherlock. You mentioned grave-robbing. Please do not tell me that he has become involved in some grave-robbing scheme.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “I am not his keeper, Poppy. Nor are you.”

  I heaved a sigh and wandered over to a corner of the room where I saw a box full of things I did not recognize. “What is all this, Sherlock? More bee paraphernalia?”

  “Yes, more bee equipment. I must keep the swarm safe.” He fixed his eyes on the slide beneath the microscope.

  I bent over the container and perused its contents. There was a collection of everything from hive stands to Honey Supers, bee brushes to pry bars to separate boxes from frames, and veil and gloves.

  “Do be careful,” he warned, not looking up. “The equipment is quite dear for a man on my fluctuating income, and I had a devil of a time finding the proper bottom board to ventilate the new hive.”

  I turned to look at him. He was now almost twenty-six; his birthday was just days away, on 6 January.

  He was just twenty, two years my senior, when we met in the spring of 1874. He had not changed much, externally or internally. Even then, he was a lone wolf, determined to seek his own path; headstrong and unconventional in his thinking. Determined to harness the powers of science and logic and deduction and his own incredible intellect, he made it his life’s mission to peel back the truth, to dispel myths and to solve mysteries. He approached each new case as if it were his first - or his last, with the enthusiasm of an inventor about to reveal his latest innovation. I worried about his zeal, his lack of discretion, his lack of appreciation for the dangers he often faced in our crime-ridden city. Sometimes in pursuit of a criminal, he was like a young boy swimming in the sea, unaware of the downward spiral, the violent churning of a tidal sinkhole and the swells that could drag him into the depths of the ocean. Where danger was concerned, he could engage in uncustomary impetuousness. Whether he admitted it or not, Sherlock sought the immortality of fame.

  His hair was dark, his eyes were grey and piercing beneath heavy, tufted brows. He was very tall and gaunt, quick and supple. His face was eager with a long beak-like nose. His fingers were long and thin; I loved to watch them plucking away at his violin, the sounds from which often reminded me of his strident voice. As was generally the case, today he wore a tweed suit. But I liked to envision him wandering around his room at Oxford in his purple dressing gown; he seemed so much more human and so much less a calculating machine when dressed thus. I remember he’d had a litter of pipes on his mantel there, but he most often smoked an oily, clay pipe when he was lost in thought, or his Cherrywood pipe on the occasions that he was inclined toward dispute and argument. I noticed his briarwood pipe near the microscope today. I had not yet determined its consanguinity to Sherlock’s temperament. As strange and indifferent to human nature as he often seemed to be, to me Sherlock was, as the poet Yeats described someone he greatly admired, “the most human person alive,” but the hardest to understand.

  “I must take great care with the bees in this abominable weather,” he muttered. “They must be wrapped. Dr. Haviland tells me that roofing paper does the trick.” He looked up, his eyes vacant. “Oh, and that reminds me. I need to take a sample of propolis to examine it.”

  “Propolis?”

 
“Bee glue. It is a resinous mixture that honey bees collect from tree buds, sap flows, and other botanical sources.” He returned his gaze to the slide and said, “There’s something for you in the container, Poppy.”

  “For me? Something to do with bees?”

  “No, nothing to do with bees. Have a look. I bought it from Morse Hudson at his art shop on Kennington Road. His mother wrapped it for me.”

  “Mrs. Hudson? Victor’s former housekeeper?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Hudson. Who else would be Morse’s mother?”

  I bent over the container again, carefully shifted some of the contents and found a small box. It was gaily wrapped in coloured paper that was marbled. My mother often used this technique for wrapping gifts, but she preferred to present gifts in keepsake boxes crafted from paper maché, decorated with paints and trinkets. My Aunt Susan usually crafted cloth gift bags in which small gifts could be hung from trees.

  Sherlock’s gesture surprised me... not just that Sherlock was actually presenting me with a Christmas gift but that it was not wrapped in something practical like brown paper or a newspaper with an article he wished me to read.

  “What is it?”

  “Well, you shall know when you open it.”

  I quickly unwrapped the gift. Inside was a small velvet box which contained a locket. “Sherlock, it’s... it’s beautiful.”

  “I thought you might place a photograph in it. You like that sort of thing, don’t you?”

  “I do! You know I do! You bought this at an art shop?”

  “Morse says it is an antique.”

  “Sherlock, thank you ever so much,” I said, rushing over to him. I touched his cheek and brushed my lips against his. He leaned back and away but our eyes held. For a moment, for just a fraction of a second, I saw in them what had flickered in the candlelight long ago in a cottage in Holme-Next-the-Sea during our one and only romantic interlude. It was but a brief flash of emotion, a spark that could give me a glimmer of hope if I allowed it to do so. I quickly suppressed my emotions. While Sherlock honed the science of deduction, I had forced myself to quash my feelings for him in self-defence.