by Dan Simmons
“It’s the King of Bohemia,” said Holmes.
Henry James wondered if he should humor the madman across from him and then decided not to.
“There is no King of Bohemia, Mr. Holmes,” he said flatly. “That is the Prince of Wales. I’ve heard that he dines here from time to time.”
Holmes, not sparing another glance at the royal party across the crowded room, sipped his cognac. “You really have not read any of Watson’s chronicles of me in The Strand, have you, Mr. James?”
Before James could reply, Holmes continued, “One of his first published stories of our adventures—if, indeed, John Watson was the chronicler or author of these adventures—was titled ‘Scandal in Bohemia’ and dealt with an indelicate case—a former prima donna of the Imperial Opera of Warsaw using a certain photograph to blackmail, for . . . romantic indiscretions . . . a very famous member of a certain royal house. Watson, always discreet, invented the ‘King of Bohemia’ in his clumsy attempt to disguise the royal gentleman’s true identity, which was, of course, our very own Prince of Wales. In truth, the ‘scandal’ was the second time I had helped the Prince out of a jam. The first time was with a potential scandal dealing with a debt incurred in card games.” Holmes smiled above the rim of his cognac glass. “There is, of course, no ‘Imperial Opera of Warsaw’ either. Watson there was doing his earnest best to disguise the Paris Opéra.”
“You are making up for Dr. Watson’s attempts at discretion with amazing indiscretion,” murmured James.
“I am dead,” said Sherlock Holmes. “A dead man has little use for discretion.”
James glanced over to where the Prince of Wales was at the center of a laughing, bowing, fawning circle of dandies.
“Since I have neither read nor heard of the story . . . chronicle . . . of your ‘Scandal in Bohemia’ adventure,” he said softly, “I must presume that you reclaimed the blackmailing adventuress’s incriminating photograph for the Prince.”
“I did . . . and in a most clever manner,” said Holmes and laughed out loud. In the noise of the busy restaurant, no one seemed to notice. “And then the woman stole it back from me, leaving a framed portrait of herself in its place.”
“You failed, in other words,” said James.
“I failed,” said Sherlock Holmes. “Completely. Miserably.” He took another sip of his cognac. “I’ve been bested by very few men in my career, Mr. James. Never before or since by a . . . woman.”
James noticed that he uttered that final word with a strong tone of contempt.
“Does this have anything to do with your recent revelation that you are not a real person, Mr. Holmes?”
The tall man across the table from James rubbed his chin. “I suppose I should really ask you to address me as ‘Sigerson’, but tonight I do not care. No, Mr. James, the ancient case of the Prince of Wales and his former paramour—may she rot in peace—has nothing whatsoever to do with the reasons for me realizing that I am not, as you said earlier, ‘real’. Would you care to hear those reasons?”
James hesitated only a second or two. “Yes,” he said.
* * *
Holmes set his empty glass down and folded his long-fingered hands on the tablecloth. “It began, as so many things in life do, with simple domestic conversations,” he began. “Those who have read Dr. Watson’s chronicles in The Strand are aware—from certain background information he has given—that in eighteen eighty, the good doctor was removed from the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, then on duty in India, to the Berkshires Sixty-sixth Foot. On twenty-seven July of that year, Watson was severely wounded during the Battle of Maiwand. For many weeks his life teetered in the balance—the intrusive piece of lead had been a jazail bullet, that kind of heavy slug fired by the long, heavy musket so commonly used by the rebels in Afghanistan—and it had done serious internal damage.
“But Watson lived, despite the heat and flies and primitive regimental medical care available to him,” continued Holmes. “In October of eighteen eighty-one, he was dispatched back to England on the troopship Orontes.”
“I fail to see how this proves or disproves . . .” began Henry James.
“Patience,” said Holmes, holding up one long finger to command silence.
“The wound from the jazail bullet was in Watson’s shoulder,” said Holmes. “At various times, in Turkish baths and once when we had to strip to swim a river while on one of my . . . adventures . . . I saw the ugly scar. But Watson had no other wounds from the wars.”
Henry James waited. A waiter came by and Holmes ordered black Turkish coffee for the both of them.
“But five years ago—I remember the date in eighteen eighty-eight,” said Holmes, “Watson’s spidery shoulder wound from the jazail bullet had suddenly become a bullet wound he was complaining of, even in print, in his leg.”
“Could there not have been two such wounds?” asked James. “One in the poor man’s shoulder, the other in his leg? Perhaps he received the second wound in London, during the course of one of your adventures.”
“A second Afghan jazail bullet?” laughed Holmes. “Fired at Watson in London? Without my knowledge? It would seem highly unlikely, Mr. James. And added to that improbability are the twin facts that Watson was never wounded, never shot, during any of our adventures he chronicled and . . . this I find most interesting . . . the original shoulder wound that I’d seen, a terrible spiderweb of scars and a livid entry wound still visible, simply had disappeared when Watson began talking and writing about his leg wound.”
“Distinctly odd,” said James. He wondered what he should do if this Holmes-Sigerson person, almost certainly an escaped patient from some secured madhouse, should suddenly grow violent.
“And then there is the fact of Dr. Watson’s wives,” said Holmes.
James merely raised one eyebrow at this non sequitur.
“He has too many of them,” said Holmes.
“Dr. Watson is a bigamist then?”
“No, no,” laughed Holmes. Their coffee arrived. It was far too bitter for James’s taste, but the madman seemed to enjoy it. “They simply come and go—as if they flicker in and out of existence—primarily depending upon what I take to be a fiction-author’s need to have Watson living with me at our apartments at two-twenty-one-B Baker Street or not. And their names keep changing almost at random, Mr. James. Now a Constance. Then Mary. Then no name at all. Then Mary again.”
“Wives have a way of dying,” said James.
“That they do, thank God,” said Holmes, nodding in agreement. “But in reality there is usually some warning of that, some illness, and—failing that—some period of mourning for the widower. Watson, bless his heart, simply moves in with me again and our adventures continue apace. Between these mythical wives, I mean.”
Henry James cleared his throat but could think of nothing to say.
“Then there is the odd fact of our residence itself,” bore on Holmes, taking no clue to stop based on his interlocutor’s obvious boredom. “I have lived—Watson and I have lived—at two-twenty-one-B Baker Street since shortly after we met in January of eighteen eighty-one.”
“Is there a paradox in that?” asked James.
“When these doubts of mine began and multiplied in the winter and spring of eighteen ninety and eighteen ninety-one,” Holmes said very softly, “I went to the office of the City Surveyor and looked at the most recent maps of our neighborhood. As of eighteen ninety-one, a full ten years after we took up residence at two-twenty-one-B, the residences and structures on Baker Street ended at Number Eighty-five.”
“Incredible,” muttered James.
“But mostly . . .” continued Holmes as if he’d not heard Henry James speak, “it is the . . . cloudiness, lack of daily detail, emptiness . . . for me of the periods between my actual cases that most makes me doubt my existence separate from some fictional page. It’s as if I’m alive . . . real . . . only when investigating a case.”
“Could not your . . . ah . . . disposition
toward indulging in certain drugs account for that?” asked James.
Holmes laughed and set his coffee cup down with a clatter. “You do read my adventures in The Strand after all!”
“Not at all,” said James. “But as I mentioned, some younger friends of mine do. I remember their commenting on your frequent injections of . . . cocaine, was it not?” James well remembered Edmund Gosse’s fascination with Holmes’s dependence upon the drug. It had made Henry James suspect that Gosse himself had experimented with injecting it upon occasion.
“Only a seven-per-cent solution,” laughed Holmes. “Quite tame by any opium-eater’s scale. But since my death on twenty-four April eighteen ninety-one, I have successfully cured myself of that self-indulgence.”
“Very good,” said James. “How did you manage that?”
“By the replacement use of a much less harmful injected substance called morphine,” said Sherlock Holmes. “And in the past weeks, I have discovered an even more miraculous and innocuous replacement—distilled by our German friend who created aspirin, Mr. Bayer himself—a drug so habit- and side-effect-free that both Bayer and those who use it have named it after its heroic qualities.”
“Yes?” said James.
“It is called heroin,” said Sherlock Holmes, “and I look forward to finding greater . . . and less expensive . . . quantities of it in America when you and I go there next week. Morphine has been sold in abundance on the streets of the United States—much more so than in England—since so many tens or hundreds of thousands of wounded soldiers continued to use it after their Civil War thirty years ago. And now this heroic heroin, while not yet released to the general marketplace, is becoming equally abundant there.”
James was goggling at the tall man. “We’re going to America? We?”
“We’re leaving for Marseilles and a steamship bound for America early in the morning,” said Holmes. “There is a seven-year-old murder there in their capital city that I am duty bound to solve, and it is in your very deep interest—compelling interest, my dear James—for you to accompany me. I could not, in good conscience, leave you behind in Paris while you are in this melancholic and possibly still self-destructive state of mind. Besides . . . you will enjoy this! The game’s afoot and we’re called to it as certainly and inescapably as your next story or book calls to your creator’s soul and writer’s pen.”
Holmes beckoned for the waiter to bring the bill and paid it while James sat there with his eyes still wide and his mouth hanging unbecomingly open.
CHAPTER 5
In the ten days that followed, while crossing the Atlantic from France to New York and then taking a train to Washington, D.C., Henry James felt as if he were in a dream. No, not so much in a dream—his dreams tended to be specific and colorful and powerful—but, rather, in a fog. A delicious and dangerous and decision-free fog.
They sailed from Marseilles on the older French liner the Paris. James thought he remembered being aboard her twelve years before, the last time he’d visited America, when he’d hurried home to Cambridge during the period when first his mother and then his father had been dying. Sherlock Holmes refused to take a more modern English steamship since it would mean a stop somewhere in England on the way—the Paris paused only briefly in Dublin—and Holmes would not set foot in England, he said, until he was “fully satisfied”. Satisfied as to what, was not further defined at that time, but James had to guess that it related to the subject of the consulting detective’s real versus fictional existence.
There had been five amazing conversations—revelations, in truth—during the past ten days before landfall in New York, and James had to sort them out not only by content but by the context of where they had been announced.
The first had been outside his hotel on the Rue de la Paix after their late-evening dining on the night they had met.
“It is, of course, absurd to think that I can—or should wish to—go to America now,” James had said, holding his umbrella in both hands like a weapon.
“But you must,” said Holmes in calm terms. “My case depends upon it.”
“ ‘Case’?” repeated Henry James. “I thought you had left being a consulting detective behind when you faked your own death almost two years ago.”
“Not a bit of it,” said Holmes. “Even as Jan Sigerson, I did my bit of detecting in Turkey, India, and elsewhere. But that was for my brother Mycroft, for Whitehall, and for England. Now I find I must take up a private case again. Solve what is almost certainly an apolitical mystery.”
James continued to hold his folded umbrella at port arms. The rain had stopped. “Let me guess,” he said. “In Dr. Watson’s absence, you need me to chronicle your adventures. To be your Boswell.”
Sherlock Holmes laughed loudly enough that the sound echoed back from the nearby stone buildings. “No, no, not at all, Mr. James. Nor do I think such a role as Boswell would suit you in any event, but certainly not in writing up the details of a mystery.”
James’s spine stiffened a bit at that. He considered himself capable of writing any sort of story—as long as neither its topic nor style was beneath his dignity. And he had done a few of those stories for money in his youth.
“What I mean,” continued Holmes, “is that while I have not had the pleasure of reading your novels and shorter fiction, Mr. James, many of my more literary acquaintances—including Watson himself—have. And from what they tell me, your rendering of the most exciting adventures you and I might have in America would end up with a beautiful young lady from America as the protagonist, various lords and ladies wandering through, verbal opaqueness followed by descriptive obtuseness, and nothing more exciting being allowed to occur in the tale than a verbal faux pas or tea service being late.”
James wondered whether he should be—and act—offended, but decided that he was not. All in all, he was amused.
“Then you could have no conceivable need for my presence in this quixotic jaunt to America you seem about to undertake, sir.”
“Ah, but I truly do, Mr. James,” said Holmes. “I need you for introductions, for information, for American context, for—what did you call it earlier?—for cover, and for companionship. I shall be a stranger in a strange land and to solve this mystery I shall need your help. Do you wish to hear more of the reasons for this?”
James said nothing. His thought had already turned away from suicide in the Seine toward the soft bed in his hotel room a few dozen paces and a lift ride from where he stood in the darkness.
“In March of eighteen ninety-one, almost exactly two years ago,” continued Holmes, either unaware of or indifferent to James’s very obvious lack of interest, “I had a visit at my bachelor quarters at two-twenty-one-B Baker Street from a prospective client. The distressed gentleman was an American, the topic was murder in the American capital, and his name was Edward Hooper. He showed me three thousand dollars that he was willing to pay me if I came with him to America and solved the mystery of his sister’s death. I accepted only one dollar—as my retainer—but it has taken these three years for me to become active in the . . . mystery.”
“No, I do not know nor have I heard of . . .” began James and then stopped abruptly.
“I believe you knew Mr. Edward Hooper’s sister—Marian Hooper Adams,” said Holmes.
“Clover,” James said so softly that he could hardly hear the two syllables himself. “Clover Adams,” said Henry James. “From the time she was a girl, everyone called Marian Hooper ‘Clover’. It suited her.”
“You knew her well then,” pressed Holmes.
“I have been friends with Henry Adams for . . . many, many years,” said James. He wished he could will himself not to speak of any of this, but this night he seemed under some strange compulsion to break confidences he normally would have guarded with his life. “I was also close to Clover Adams—as close as anyone could be to such an intelligent but unpredictable and frequently melancholic woman. I was a guest in their home the last time I was in America i
n the early eighteen eighties.”
“You know the public details of her death then,” said Holmes. There was a strange light in the consulting detective’s eye, James thought, but it could have been a reflection from one of the gas lights that still illuminated this section of the Rue de la Paix.
“Her death by suicide,” James said in a sharper tone than he might have intended. “By her own hand. Six . . . no . . . some seven-and-a-half years ago now. It is ancient history for all but the most closely bereaved such as her husband Henry and her dear friends—a category which includes me.”
“On six December, eighteen eighty-five,” Holmes said quietly. “The date is part of the mystery presented to me by her brother, Mr. Edward Hooper.”
James started to say that he had never had the pleasure of actually meeting Clover’s brother Edward, that Clover and Henry had always referred to him as “Ned”, but instead he heard himself snapping words like a whip. “Death by sad suicide, Mr. Holmes. Everyone agreed to that. Her husband Henry. My particular mutual friend and neighbor to the Adamses, Mr. John Hay. The doctor. The police. The newspapers. Everyone agreed that she had taken her own life. She was of a melancholic nature, you see. All of us who knew and loved Clover Adams had known that. A tendency toward melancholy—and even self-murder—ran in the Hooper family. And she was in a deep, perhaps irrecoverable mourning for her father who had passed away earlier that year. She had been very close to her father, you see, and nothing that Henry Adams or anyone else could do in the months following Mr. Hooper’s death seemed capable of breaking the iron bonds of loss and melancholy that had closed around poor Clover.”
James stopped. He was almost panting from the intensity and exertion of his little speech. He felt like a fool for saying so much.
Holmes reached into an interior pocket of his tweed jacket and removed what looked to be a small white card. Despite his spirit of resistance, James unclenched one hand from his umbrella and took the offered card. It looked like a lady’s visiting card, although it was done in simple white rather than the colorful cards now in vogue in England and America and was embossed with a subtle white rectangle within the rectangle of the card itself. At the top of the card within that plain border, there were five hearts embossed. Four of the hearts had been colored in, in blue, with what looked to have been hasty strokes of a colored pencil or crayon. The fifth heart was left uncolored—blank.