by Lyndsay Faye
“My dear fellow, wait—” I attempted, less worried at the moment about documents than about my friend’s health.
“Internal military communications reports,” Holmes gasped, still struggling for breath after his collision with the carriage. He coughed violently, but did not cease his rummaging.
“Stop, I tell you! Let me—”
“Highly sensitive government files, telegram protocols . . . Oh, just imagine the look on my brother’s face when I hand this over!”
“Yes, yes, you’re very clever. And in a moment, if you don’t let me examine you, I’m going to procure physical restraints.”
“By Jove, they would have got away with it, too, if not—look to Kenworthy!”
Following Holmes’s upraised eye, I swung about to face the manor’s front doorway. But Damien Kenworthy only collapsed to the stone steps, his head buried in his arms, the picture of a fallen man with no hope of recourse.
With the aid of several stalwart Whitehall aspirers and two retired generals, we managed to secure Kenworthy and Murillo within, sending word both to the Yard and to Mycroft Holmes that the proper authorities were required in Hampstead immediately. I, meanwhile, convinced Holmes that bleeding all over the house would hardly be appropriate, as there were ladies present, and whisked him off to the kitchen to patch him back together, dismissing the frightened staff after they had provided me with a medical kit.
Once I had him sat upon the table, after having twice lost my temper far enough to bark at the impossible creature, the manic man of action quieted into a more docile version of Sherlock Holmes, and he allowed his coat to be peeled off and his shirtsleeves sliced farther open. The gash ran from his elbow up the back of his arm for six inches, but was gratifyingly shallow save for one deep gouge, and could be stanched with cloth and plasters until I was able to stitch it up at Baker Street. I breathed a sigh of relief and set to work with the iodine.
“Your argument regarding the delicacy of the fair sex is not entirely sound,” Holmes noted with a twinkle in his eye, folding his ruined jacket and pushing it aside as I cut a length of bandaging. “Miss Bost is a lady, and doubtless would much prefer to witness firsthand blood which was shed in the cause of justice. I say, you look slightly dazed, Doctor,” he added, concerned.
“You could have been severely injured,” I muttered. “In fact, for all you know, you are severely injured, but you are the most stubborn patient I’ve ever been unlucky enough to treat. Now, be still while I prevent this from becoming infected.”
“Watson, I did not mean to alarm you.”
“Perhaps not, but setting intentions aside, you did alarm me.”
“Don’t look like that, my dear fellow—it’s only a scratch.”
Sighing, I shook my head. “I know that. Still, it was all a bit excessive, Holmes. I have been used to aiding you in perilous situations, and very occasionally aiding you at tea parties, but never simultaneously.”
“Very true.” Holmes observed me with mock gravity. “It was a double-fronted war, to be sure, and one you fought most valiantly.”
“You flatter me. By way of reward, rather than keeping me in the dark until your public denouement, you shall at once tell me what in the name of the devil just happened.”
My friend, happily, was so delighted to have wrestled a villain to the grass at a garden soiree as to be amenable to this request.
“It was the Protector lock.” His eyes tensed at their edges as I cleaned the cut, but otherwise he failed to react at all. “We both knew Murillo’s former company to be fanciful, but the lock was the second lie. That variety of lock can be picked only with the greatest skill, and using a very fine tool. A half-diamond pick or even a snake rake, as it’s called, would fail utterly, and my own preference is to employ a leather needle when cracking such a subtle device. Nothing and no one capable of causing those clumsy gouges in the metal could pick that lock. Therefore?”
“Kenworthy desired us to suppose the lock had been picked when it had not.”
“Exactly so.”
“But what was their scheme, Holmes? Where did the Compañía Telegráfica de Murillo enter into it?”
“Doubtless Damien Kenworthy will fill us in on the exact details, but here is what I surmise. Kenworthy, as befalls so many of our young aristocrats for one reason and another, found himself in need of money. Selling household treasures and family heirlooms is the surest way to expose that sordid secret, and so he determined to steal himself a valuable commodity instead—the most sensitive of the military papers to which he had access. He engaged Murillo as an accomplice.
“Now, the creation of a plausible scapegoat is a very touch-and-go business. But Kenworthy’s plan was subtler than most. He set Murillo up as the ex-president of a telegraph firm and gave Mycroft a study claiming the same. The mistake, he thought, would not be noticed at once. Instead, Murillo would attend Kenworthy’s event as a benign acquaintance, bearing an empty briefcase, and lock it within Kenworthy’s study. Kenworthy would then deface his own lock, suggesting an intruder had penetrated the house, or even casting suspicions on one of his guests. Following the robbery outcry, but after the study had been examined, he would leave Murillo—overwhelmed and distraught—with free access to the supposed crime scene. The safe containing the true valuables, the military documents, would be left open, or else in a quiet moment Kenworthy would open it himself and turn the papers over. After a failed investigation into his lost capital, Murillo would then exit Lowther Park with state secrets hidden in a supposedly empty briefcase. Do you follow me so far?”
“Very clearly. But why—”
“The trick to stealing from Parliament is in laying the blame at another’s doorstep. Tomorrow, or the next day perhaps, once Murillo’s whereabouts were well and truly untraceable, Kenworthy would have appeared with his hat in his hand and a look of horrified contrition before my brother. He would confess the papers were missing, call the mysterious unsolved robbery at his home a clever hoax, accuse Murillo of the theft, and then point out—proving once and for all that Francisco Murillo could not be trusted—that the Compañía Telegráfica de Murillo does not even exist. Kenworthy would have been demoted, I imagine, but not arrested. Mycroft, however, knew the truth about the company at once, of course. And so here we are.”
“If you are right,” I said, tying the knot on the bandage, “it was a low and despicable scheme.”
“That may be true,” Holmes reflected, “but it made for a highly meritorious garden party. The best I have ever attended.”
Holmes was not the only guest who thought so. It proved that Miss Jacquelynn Bost, whose slightly rabid regard for my friend’s work could not fail to endear her to me, was the society columnist for a well-known London women’s magazine, and very apt to recount personal anecdotes for the delight of matrons and housewives. She lost no time whatsoever in declaring the Kenworthy tea “the nonpareil event of the fashionable season” thanks to the “stunning drama of having firsthand witnessed Mr. Sherlock Holmes prevent a crime of national moment.” It was Mrs. Hudson who brought this document to my attention, and when I showed it to Holmes, his remark was one in which I took a certain degree of modest pleasure.
“You have made your point, Watson,” he acknowledged with an ironic twist to his brow, putting his cherrywood pipe between his lips decisively. “The Strand is, if only by comparison, a highly literary magazine.”
PART III
THE RETURN
An Empty House
Excerpt from the diary of Dr. John Watson,
March 17th, 1894:
I did not suppose this afternoon would be easy or even tolerable. No devoted husband could have imagined it thus. It shames me to say, therefore, that I found events so strangely . . . unrelated to myself, as if John H. Watson were a spectre existing on a thin grey plane and the day had simply ground along without him.
It
seems that if one is connected to a tragedy intimately enough, perversely, one may as well not be there at all.
The earth of the cemetery beneath my boots was dry sand before the gates, grating stone along the paths, dead leaves edging the margins, and finally shivering grasses surrounding the tombstones. Birds called to one another and in the distance oblivious church bells chimed, stopping for no one. Above us, the sky fretted with impending thunder while the gusting winds likewise warned of cataclysms. March is a wicked month in London, I have always felt. Its weather hints at remorseful improvements and then rains glad cruelties upon the heads of all and sundry.
Stop.
All this petty vacillation might appear to be what Holmes used to call “color and life,” but in reality is much worse than those harmless turns of phrase he so disdained in my fiction-tinged accounts. This is prevarication, delay in stating the inevitable: that I shed no tears, that no one leapt into the pit of clay, that even a dog would have whined, and I did nothing. How much better a man I should think myself if I could have truly felt any of it! Granted, I had supposed I was prepared for the eventuality of her death, for her illness was unmercifully protracted. Picturing her face two days ago—that sweet countenance with its wasted lips and hollowed eyes at peace finally and forevermore—gladdens me whenever I fail to succumb to unreasoning selfishness.
Yet here I sit, my head and my throat aching, able to write only of the weather.
I buried my wife today.
Mary would never have demanded this exercise of me, I am sure of it. But there. My own requirements of myself will be met, by heaven. Honesty will be had, if not sensibility.
I buried my wife today, and can scarcely set it down, and now will try no further. Had I a heart left to mourn anyone, I should think it fit to wail like a savage at present, rage at the mad moon with my fists raised.
The fellow who would have done so being absent, I shall retire and hope some spirit returns to me in my slumber.
Excerpt from the diary of Dr. John Watson,
March 18th, 1894:
Reading back over my previous entry, I am thoroughly sick at my own weakness and apathy in the face of fresh bereavement. When others fail to meet my expectations, base complaining is never my response—why then should I carp at the page when I fail to meet my own? There is no course to choose but onward, after all, and I fear no place lower for me to sink.
Resolved: to take courage, to honor the departed, to ever seek comfort by means of occupations at which I can be proud in the execution if not happy in the act. Many men and women are allowed no more than this. And can I truly think myself unlucky, when I have loved and been esteemed in return by such valorous spirits as I have encountered in my life?
No indeed. I’ve been blessed beyond imagining—to have spent a placid, insipid eternity in lesser company would not be preferable, and I would not choose it. I must remind myself of this. Daily, it seems.
In my lowness yesterday, I neglected to record salient details. Mary has been long without kith or kin, and my family is likewise quite dissolved—parents in the ground, a brother lost to me years before he destroyed himself. Therefore I expected a modest turnout, for all that my wife was a beacon to those in need, and am glad to say I was mistaken. Mr. and Mrs. Isa Whitney were present, Mrs. Cecil Forrester, several of my own regular patients, the entire Anstruther clan, and a gratifying number of neighbors who wept most touchingly during interludes in which I found myself numb as a fence post. It was to my own considerable surprise, therefore, that I felt so roused by a reedy and familiar voice just after the ceremony had ended.
“Doctor Watson! I’ll not say I’m glad to see you, for I’m nothing but sorry under the circumstances. But by George, it’s good to find myself in your company.”
Turning, I encountered none other than Inspector Lestrade. His close-set eyes shone bright as polished marbles, hard and canny as usual—yet beneath the shrewdness, there lay considerable sympathy which in no way resembled pity. I’ve always liked Lestrade heartily in such moments of candor, when he isn’t fuming with pique or preening like a lapdog, and I gripped his hand harder than I’d meant to. When I am not in Lestrade’s company, I don’t think often of him. When I am, I wonder at this lapse, as he is equally as compassionate as he is forgettable, and I simply like the fellow, and it isn’t as if I possess any remarkable characteristics myself that would justify my putting on airs. The remarkable one left us years ago.
We exchanged unbearably polite remarks regarding Mary’s final weeks and what luck the rain had forestalled. Finally, I cut the chap off in mid-platitude. I’d begun to sense a despairing roar lodged in my lungs, writhing to escape, and thought best to prevent its release.
“Lestrade, thank you for coming. Though as to how you knew to be here—the obituaries yesterday, I presume?”
Lestrade smiled his terrier’s smile and swung his hands behind his back, clasping them. The familiar gesture pleased me. He looked well, despite his habitual wearied brow and twitching chin.
“Aye,” he owned. “Though for all that some folk never held my brains in much esteem, I’d have known something was amiss anyhow. You’d used to stop by so often to compare our case notes, twice a week at the least, and lately . . .” Trailing off, he shrugged slender shoulders.
Lestrade was right, of course, and must have missed me. It seems that I have been neglectful of my few remaining friends. Thanks to twenty-four ardently penned chronicles of my friend’s cases published between July of 1891, just after I had lost him, and December of 1893, when I understood I was to lose Mary as well, I’d become something of a fixture at the Yard.
“I ought to have wired you,” I said with regret. “Don’t take offense, please, but there were pressing matters on my mind.”
“Not another word! You’ve been needed elsewhere. Obituaries, ha—a good guess, that. You’ll make a detective yet someday, Doctor.”
The cast of my face must have shifted from unwell to ashen, for he likewise paled and, pressing my arm, said, “My apologies—I’d no wish to rattle you.”
“You haven’t,” I sighed. “I’m merely fatigued, I expect.”
“God save us, ‘fatigued’ can’t begin to describe it. You’re the last man in Christendom I’d have wished these past three years on, Dr. Watson, and if I’ve broached a subject which offended—”
I shook my head; for he had brought up an old wound, a close and familiar hurt that reassured me rather than rent. Or so I always tell myself it ought to do. Some pains blanket us, it seems, dulling the senses, and others we clutch to us like daggers sunk hilt-deep. In my mind’s eye, a very thin man rubbed his hands together, grey eyes aglow, whilst he angled his head at the inspector as an alert sparrow studies a likely worm.
“No, no,” I replied, shifting. “Not at all. And now you mention it, I am indeed at work upon another tale. You recall that dreadful business over the Abernetty family?”
Narrowing his eyes, Lestrade attempted another cautious smile. It was to cheer me, not to ingratiate himself, and I liked him all the better for it. “Well, of course I do. What a ghastly case that was, to be sure! I can hardly think of it without my skin crawling. You’re really writing it up?”
“I am.”
“Horrid affair.” He shuddered. “Why, that case happened very soon before . . .”
“Before Switzerland, yes. I’ve been writing of him constantly these three years—you needn’t avoid Sherlock Holmes’s name so. Please dine with me.” I gestured at the exit of the churchyard, where well-meaning folk averted their eyes from my face in respectful silence, kerchiefs pressed to the salt on their cheeks. “If I stay here an instant longer, I’ll go mad, and anyhow I’ve not eaten in . . . Do you know, Lestrade, I can’t think how long. I really am forming detective-like qualities. Sleepless nights, and now eschewing meals? It won’t do at all. Come along and remind me of the exact details of
the parsley clue.”
Lestrade shook his head as he preceded me away from the obscenely fresh grave. “I’ll never forgive Mr. Holmes, you realize, for that one—I couldn’t make head nor tail of it before the blasted butter gave all away. Made a complete ass of myself.”
“We both did.”
“Oh, pish, you know as well as I do you weren’t the one who tried to convince England’s highest-strung logician that there’s such a thing as murderous ghosts.”
Half-smiling, I admitted, “I didn’t suppose he’d approve that theory, no. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t frightened.”
“Well, you didn’t show it. What a spineless little rabbit he must have thought me!”
“He didn’t, not at all. He even said as much.”
“Oh, come, there’s no need to rag me over it,” Lestrade scoffed.
“No, it’s true—he once mentioned you after you were frightened of the hound, that horrible night out on the moors at Baskerville Hall. Holmes said had you not been scared for your skin, he’d have thought you far dimmer than he’d supposed, but that it was sheer bull-headed nerve got you up again. He admired that. He didn’t phrase it very kindly, but then he never did, did he?”
Spots of color appeared on Lestrade’s cheeks and he cleared his throat loudly into his gloved fist. “No. From Sherlock Holmes, that’s practically a medal of honor. Thank you for telling me. Sometimes I’m curious whether the man himself was ever afraid in his life—is it any wonder his standards were so high? Was he made of clockwork, Doctor, or did you ever see the worst ones affect him?”
I thought of Holmes striding into my consulting room with an unhealthy translucence to his skin—not even greeting me, though he looked me over with as much care as he would any client—and then flinging all my shutters closed as if they had personally offended him.
