“’Necessity’? ‘International consequences’?” I threw his words back at him. “You sound more like Mycroft Holmes than his brother Sherlock!”
“Bravo again, Watson!” Holmes said. “I did indeed speak to Mycroft upon our return to England.”
“I thought as much,” I said, eyeing him with disapproval.
Rising from his chair, Holmes clasped his walking stick and pointed to the open French windows through which, despite the descending dusk, we could still see the ocean.
Grudgingly I joined Holmes on the gravel footpath as he ambled toward the chalky cliffs that overlook the sea. The small stones grated beneath our feet.
“You’re quite right, Watson,” he said. “Mycroft did indeed help me see the wisdom in keeping this story to our immediate selves.”
“No doubt,” I muttered.
“In point of fact, Mycroft tried to put us off this investigation from the very start when we met with him at the Diogenes Club in March.”
I greeted this information with silence. Besides the omnipresent pounding of the surf below, only the crunch of our boots on the path and the cries of a few sea birds rent the peaceful afternoon that was fast turning into evening.
“It seems, Watson, that much of what we learned from our investigations in America was already known at the highest levels of our own government.”
“Then why didn’t Mycroft inform us?”
“Apparently the government feared that an attempt to thwart Mrs. Frevert might possibly explode in their faces. Besides, one never knows just what might turn up in a new investigation. His Majesty’s Government did possess the barest outlines of the plot, but not the names of its perpetrators that we have now supplied through Mycroft and for which Downing Street is extremely grateful.”
“Most accommodating of us,” I said, unassuaged. It rankled me to think that we had been performing someone else’s service. “But just because Mycroft wants us to remain silent—”
“On the contrary,” Holmes interrupted. “It’s not ‘just Mycroft,’ as you so simply put it. Mycroft’s own instructions come from a higher authority in the government. In fact, the highest.”
It never failed to surprise me whenever Holmes’s and my activities caught the attention of the Crown; but here was obviously another such instance, and who was I to demur?
By way of answer I looked below me to the rocky white coastline that spread out in glistening stretches in either direction. My gaze followed the receding waves that were painted a fiery orange by the setting sun.
“We learn from nature, old fellow,” my companion said as I stared contemplatively toward the horizon. “The water that blankets the Titanic and all her lost souls is like the mantle we human beings throw upon the Truth, neither one to be disturbed. How did Phillips describe the aftermath of that terrible naval disaster so long ago: ‘The sea smoothed out again and began to laugh.’”
In the darkness I doubted that Holmes could see me shrug.
“Why not leave the final words about the conspirators to Mrs. Frevert?” Holmes offered. “It was she, after all, who had written on the stone over her brother’s grave, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’”
One need not have been Sherlock Holmes at that moment to detect the reluctance in my submission.
“I understand,” I murmured.
And so we stood on the chalky cliffs as darkness fell, blanketing us and the sea alike. Circling far above us, some lost solitary gull shrieked in the night.
I did not hear from my friend Sherlock Holmes for a number of months following that last conversation; and when I did just before Christmas, it was not a letter that arrived in the post, but rather a number of cuttings from American newspapers. Much of the information these stories contained had, of course, been published by the British press. I did not require notification from Sherlock Holmes, for instance, to inform me that Woodrow Wilson, the former head of David Graham Phillips’s alma mater, Princeton University, had defeated Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft for the American Presidency the previous month; but some of the news appearing in the cuttings from Holmes had not made its way into our periodicals, and when the articles were viewed together, they seemed to form a fitting dénouement to the story that had begun earlier that same year with the arrival of Mrs. Frevert in my surgery.
Street singers who were entertaining Mrs. Watson and me with Christmas melodies had just reached our windows when I opened the large brown envelope from Holmes. Because of its size, I had to shake it several times over the dining-room table in order to be sure the packet was empty. In all, six small strips of yellowing paper fluttered out. As I slid them around on the oak table to secure their proper chronological order, I felt I was manipulating into place the final pieces of some intricate puzzle.
The first story reported the proposal made the previous May 13 by the American Congress for an amendment to the United States Constitution requiring the popular election of senators. Thus, some six years after Phillips’s 1906 attack on that body in his disputatious articles, reform seemed probable. Indeed, although I did not know it at the time, the people’s right to vote directly for their senators would become law the next year when on 8 April, 1913—almost twelve months to the day following the loss of the Titanic–the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified.
A cutting from August 1912 told of Theodore Roosevelt’s nomination for president by the Progressives’ uniquely and appropriately nicknamed Bull Moose party after the Republicans had rejected him in favour of President Taft. Giving the keynote address at this third party’s convention was none other than Albert Beveridge, who himself was standing for governor of Indiana as a Progressive.
The third cutting, and by far the longest, recounted a story that, had it not been for our own personal experiences with the homicidal factor in American politics, we would have found unbelievable. It reported the attempted assassination of Roosevelt on October 14 in Milwaukee. Wounded by a gunman, the former president was miraculously saved only because the bullet’s velocity was slowed by passing through his spectacles case and the manuscript of a speech, both of which were tucked into an inside coat pocket. True to his spirit, the indomitable Roosevelt went on to deliver his scheduled address before allowing himself to be taken to hospital.
A fourth article told of Roosevelt’s recovery; a fifth recorded not only his political defeat but that of Beveridge as well.
The last cutting in the little row of stories I had laid out on the table was the shortest of them all, a snippet from a social column reporting the entrance to a sanitarium the previous summer of Mrs. Carolyn Frevert. She was suffering from fatigue.
That there was no message from Holmes himself was not surprising. He knew that these final clippings would help me round out my account of the case, and so I concluded that he approved of my composing this narrative; but I also know that he, like myself, still regards it as an explosive story whose full details must continue to be withheld from public scrutiny for several more years. Thus, I shall add these last details only to complete the record and then hide it away until its telling no longer threatens so many actors still performing on the political stage.
It is now the fifth Christmas since the end of the Great War. Listening to this year’s carollers, I sit with Mrs. Watson at my side before the glowing hearth, a light snow falling gently beyond our windows on Queen Anne Street. Like the recurrence of the seasons, it is an unending story, I think—that of concealing and uncovering and concealing once more. It is a drama bound to be acted again and again as long as Authority must convince the populace of Government’s ability to control. I understand the necessity, but necessity can lead to expediency, and expediency in the political world can expose the most dreadful of human frailties. With murder and deceit as accomplices, it was just such expediency that so obviously resulted in falsely identifying for the historical record the murky role of one Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough as the lone assassin of David
Graham Phillips.
London
23 December, 1922
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
The following books and periodicals will further elucidate many of the events referred to by Dr. Watson in his narrative:
Baring-Gould, William S., ed. The Annotated Sherlock Holmes. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967.
Churchill, Allen. Park Row. New York: Rinehart and Company, 1958.
Filler, Louis. Voice of the Democracy: A Critical Biography of David Graham Phillips. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania and State University Press, 1978.
Garmey, Stephen. Gramercy Park: An Illustrated History of a New York Neighborhood. Routledge Books, 1984.
Hagedorn, Hermann. The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill. New York: Macmillan Company, 1954.
Highsmith, Carol M., and Ted Landphair. Union Station: A Decorative History of Washington’s Grand Terminal. Washington, D.C.: Chelsea Publishing, 1988.
Los Angeles Times. January 24, 1911. “Author Shot Six Times.”The New York Times:
January 24, 1911. “Author Phillips Shot Six Times, May Recover.”
January 25, 1911. “Phillips Dies of his Wounds.”
January 26, 1911. “Phillips Funeral Set for To-morrow.”
January 28, 1911. “Throng at Phillips Funeral.”
March 4, 1911. “David Graham Phillip’s Will Filed.”
June 23, 1911. “Mrs. Phillips Dies on Train.”
January 6, 1954. “Algernon Lee, 80, Educator, Is Dead.”
Phillips, David Graham. The Cost. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1904.
_____. The Plum Tree. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1904.
_____. The Treason of the Senate. Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1964.
Ravitz, Abe C. David Graham Phillips. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966.
Rodgers, Paul C., Jr. “David Graham Phillips: A Critical Study.” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1955.
Tracy, Jack. The Encyclopedia Sherlockiana. New York: Avon Books, 1979.
Victor, Daniel D. “The Muckraker and the Dandy: The Conflicting Personae of David Graham Phillips.” Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1976.
Viereck, George Sylvestre. The House of the Vampire. New York: Arno Press, 1976.
Also Available
The further Adventures of
SHERLOCK HOLMES
SÉANCE FOR A VAMPIRE
BY FRED SABERHAGEN
Prologue
Of course I can tell you the tale. But you should understand at the start that there are points where the telling may cause me to become rather emotional. Because I—even I, Prince Dracula—find the whole matter disturbing, even at this late date. It brought me as near to the true death as I have ever been, before or since—and in such an unexpected way! No, this affair you wish to hear about, the one involving the séances and the vampires, was not the commonplace stuff of day-to-day life. Hardly routine even in the terms of my existence, which for more than five hundred years has been—how shall I say it?—has not been dull.
It is difficult to find the words with which to characterize this chain of events. It was more than grotesque, it was fantastic. Parts of it almost unbelievable. You’ll see. Pirates, mesmerism, executions by hanging. Stolen treasure, murder, kidnapping, revenge and seduction. Women taken by force, attempts to materialize the spirits of the dead...
I know what you are going to say. Everything in the above list is a bit out of the ordinary, but still the daily newspapers, those of any century you like, abound in examples. But in this case the combination was unique. And soon you will see that I am not exaggerating about the fantasy. Some of my hearers may not even believe in the existence of vampires, may find that elementary starting point quite beyond credibility.
Never mind. Let those who have such difficulty turn back here, before we really start; they have no imaginations and no souls.
Still with me? Very good. Actually no one besides myself can tell the tale now, but I can relate it vividly—because, with your indulgence, I will allow myself a little creative latitude as regards details, and also the luxury of some help in the form of several chapters written decades ago by another eyewitness. He, this other witness, who is now in effect becoming my co-author, was your archetypical Englishman, a somewhat stolid and unimaginative chap, but also a gentleman with great respect for truth and honor.
As it happens I was nowhere near London’s Execution Dock on the June morning in 1765 when the whole fantastic business may fairly be said to have begun. However, somewhere past the halfway point between that date and this, less than a single century ago in the warm summer of 1903, I lived through the startling conclusion. In that latter post-Victorian year I happened to be on hand when the whole affair was pieced together logically by—will you begin to doubt me if I name him?—by a certain breathing man blessed with unequaled skills in the unraveling of the grotesque and the bizarre, a friend of the above eyewitness and also a distant relative of mine. And this adventure involving vampires and séances was enough, I think, to drive the logician to retirement.
But let me start at what I will call the beginning, in 1765...
* * *
There had been laughter inside the crumbling walls of Newgate during the night; at a little past midnight a guard in a certain hellish corridor was ready to swear that he had just heard the soft giggle of a woman, coming from one of the condemned cells, a place where no woman could possibly have been. Naturally at that hour all was dark inside the cages, and there was nothing that could have been called a disturbance; so the guard made no attempt to look inside.
Some hours later, when the first daylight, discouraged and rendered lifeless by these surroundings, filtered through to show the prison’s stinking, grim interior, there was of course no woman to be seen. There had been no realistic possibility of anyone’s passing in or out. The cell in question contained only the prisoner, the tall, red-bearded pirate captain, still breathing, just as he was supposed to be—for a few hours yet. Breathing but otherwise silent, not giggling like a woman, no, he was still sane—poor chap. And the guard, as little anxious as any of us ever are to seem a fool, was privately glad that he had said nothing, raised no ridiculous alarm.
No one in the prison had anything to say about impossibilities that might have been heard or seen before the dawn.
An hour or so after that same dawn, upon one of those raw June British mornings suggestive of the month of March, a solemn procession left London’s Newgate Prison. At the heart of the grim train emerging from those iron gates there rolled a tall, heavy, open cart in which rode three doomed men, all standing erect with arms chained behind them. Their three sets of leg irons had been struck off only an hour ago, by the prison blacksmith. Once out of the prison gate, the cart, departing sharply from its customary route, turned east. These prisoners had been convicted by the Admiralty court, and such did not at that time “go west” with the ordinary felons to hang on Tyburn Tree. Instead, a special fate awaited them.
Astride his horse at the very head of the procession was the Deputy Marshal of the Admiralty. Red-faced and grave, this functionary bore in prominent display the Silver Oar, almost big enough to row with, symbol of that court’s authority over human activity on the high seas, even to the most distant portions of the globe. Next came the elegant coach carrying the Marshal himself, resplendent in his traditional uniform, surrounded by his coachmen wearing their distinctive livery. After these, on horseback, rode a number of City officials, one or two of considerable prominence. But whatever their station, few amid the steadily growing throng of onlookers had eyes for them, or for anyone but the central figures in the morning’s drama.
The high ceremonial cart in the middle of the parade came lumbering along deliberately upon great wooden wheels, which, though freshly greased, squeaked mildly. The three prisoners standing more or less erect in the middle of the cart had their backs to one another, and with their arms still in irons had little choice but to le
an on one another for mutual support. The executioner-Thomas Turlis in that year—and his assistant rode standing in the cart beside the prisoners, and a Newgate guard walked beside each of the great slow-turning wheels.
The cart was followed immediately by a substantial force of marshal’s men and sheriff’s officers, mostly afoot. These walking men had no trouble keeping up; those who calculated the time of departure from the prison had assumed that only a modest pace would be possible. The narrow, cobbled streets made progress for a large vehicle slow at best, and today as usual the throng of onlookers grew great enough to stop the death-cart altogether several times before the place of execution could be reached.
All three of the men who were riding to be hanged today had been convicted of the same act of piracy. The tallest of the condemned, the only one with anything exceptional in his nature or his appearance, was Alexander Ilyich Kulakov, red-haired and green-eyed, rawboned but broad-shouldered and powerful, his red beard straggling over his scarred cheeks and jaw. Kulakov was Russian, but at the moment nationality did not matter. His Britannic Majesty’s justice was about to claim all three lives impartially—none of them had any influential friends in London—quite the opposite.
The morning’s procession carried its victims east, as I have said. A little over two miles east of Newgate Prison, passing just north of the great dome of St. Paul’s, through Cornhill and Whitechapel, past Tower Hill and close past the pale gloomy bulk of the squat Tower itself, to Wapping, a district largely composed of docks and taverns, nestled into a broad curve formed by the north bank of the Thames.
And with every rod of progress achieved by the doomed men and their escort, it seemed that the crowds increased. Last night and this morning word had spread, as it always did, of a scheduled hanging. Hundreds went to London’s various scaffolds every year, but despite the relatively commonplace nature of the event the route of the procession was thickly lined with spectators. As often as not, when the high cart stalled in traffic, folk leaned from windows or trees to offer the condemned jugs or bottles or broken cups of liquor.
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