by Dan Simmons
“Of course,” said Holmes. He’d found the stairway up to the room or rooms over the still-active carriage house—active if the strong scent of manure from the barn level was any indicator—and took the steps upward two at a time in his eager anticipation.
After several knocks, giving James time to climb the steps more slowly and stand puffing a bit on the landing outside the door, a small, gray-haired lady with cataracts clouding her right eye cautiously opened the door.
Holmes removed his top hat. “Good afternoon, madam. My name is Sherlock Holmes and this is my associate Dr. . . . excuse me . . . Mr. James. We’ve come because I’m an old friend of Miss Irene Adler, the lady to whom you forward the letters sent here to a certain Miss Rebecca Lorne Baxter, and I wish to find her most recent address.”
“What did you say your name was?” asked the old lady.
“Ah . . . Mr. Sherlock Holmes, madam,” he said more slowly. “And whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?”
The woman with the white hair, pale white skin, and white cataract paused before saying, “Mrs. Gaddis.”
“Were you, by any chance, a teacher for many years, Mrs. Gaddis?” asked Holmes. “Your diction suggests you were.”
“I taught for twenty-eight years before retiring with commendations and honors and I don’t receive a decent enough pension to afford these tiny two rooms over a smelly stable,” said Mrs. Gaddis. “But your name was never mentioned to me by the lady who pays me five dollars a month to forward her mail, so I’m afraid I must close the door, Mr. Holmes.”
As gently as he could, Holmes blocked the door from closing with his left foot and a seemingly casual hand set flat on the windowless door. “She must have left some instructions for my arrival,” he said quickly. “I know how playful Miss Adler is. Some puzzle or question by which I could identify myself and receive her address from you.”
Mrs. Gaddis squinted with her one good eye. “The lady who pays me for passing along her mail—and I shan’t say where that final destination for her mail is nor even if it’s under a different name than the Mrs. Lorne-Baxter you mentioned—did say that someday an Englishman with a Yorkshire accent might come knocking at my door, and if he did, I should put a question to him to verify his identity.”
Holmes had been holding his silky top hat in his hand but now he almost set it atop his greased-back hair and tipped it symbolically. “I am that London gentleman she designated,” he said happily, trying to jolly the dour Mrs. Gaddis into greater cooperation. “Perhaps you can tell by my English accent.”
“Accents can be put on like hats or socks,” said Mrs. Gaddis, still frowning. “But I shall ask you the question my benefactress told to me . . . if I can remember it properly.”
James almost smiled as Holmes’s face showed a quick glimpse of panic at this being a dead end in his quest to find Irene Adler, all because of an elderly former-teacher’s faulty memory.
But age obviously hadn’t clouded her mind as thoroughly as her vision. “Here’s the question I’m to put to the Englishman caller,” said Mrs. Gaddis, pulling it from her memory as if taking an aging sheet of parchment down from some high shelf. “What were my last words to him at our last brief meeting?”
Holmes laughed. “Her last words to me were—‘Good-night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes’,” he said. “But I didn’t recognize her when she said it because my friend Dr. Watson and I were in the act of unlocking the door of our home on Baker Street when this thin young lad, short hair slicked back under a derby and wearing an oversized ulster with the collar turned up, said it in passing. Miss Adler was an actress and enjoys . . . or at least enjoyed . . . disguises almost as much as I do.”
“The words were correct,” said Mrs. Gaddis, still frowning. “You wait here and I’ll find the copy I made out of her forwarded mail address.”
Mrs. Gaddis was back in less than half a minute—James peered past Holmes into her small but tidy, almost cozy, apartment—and she handed Holmes the note card and said, “I believe that completes our conversation, Mr. Holmes.”
The detective held up a finger in protest. “Not at all,” he said happily. “Common decency, to say nothing of courtesy, compels me to pay you a very little something as mere metaphor for my sincere appreciation of the service you have been carrying out for my friend, Miss Adler, as well as for your help to me in finding that old friend.”
Mrs. Gaddis shook her head, held up a blocking hand, and was about to say no when Holmes handed her a $20 bill and released it so she had to grasp it. Whatever she was going to say, she didn’t.
“Teachers are the most underappreciated and least recompensed of all our esteemed professional classes,” Holmes said quickly, ignoring Mrs. Gaddis’s half-hearted attempts to hand the bill back to him. This time he did tip his hat and secure it firmly on his head before clattering down the steps. James nodded and smiled his own faux-appreciation before following Holmes.
* * *
While riding to North Station, James asked to see the address the retired teacher had given Holmes. It was, he recognized, very near if not quite on Dupont Circle in Washington.
“So she never left Washington after all,” murmured the author. “I’m quite sure that Henry Adams and John Hay have believed her gone all these years.”
“It’s Adams that gave me this Beacon Hill mail address,” said Holmes. “And she’s been responding from there for years. Obviously Irene Adler posts the return letter from Washington with an envelope included with her handwriting and the Beacon Hill return address, and Mrs. Gaddis dutifully transfers the letter and posts it from Boston. For five dollars per month help on her rent.”
“You’re certain that Rebecca Lorne and Irene Adler are . . . were . . . the same person?” said James.
“Absolutely certain. If I hadn’t been before, the ‘identifying question’ of her last words to me that night in London—I believe Watson wrote that case up under the title ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, a nonsensical title because he felt that he had to hide the identity of the English Royal Personage.”
“I’m only surprised that your friend Dr. Watson did not have the king exit, pursued by a bear,” said James.
Holmes looked at James blankly for a few seconds and then exploded in that high, almost-cawing, full laughter that James had heard only a few times. Holmes’s sharp barks of laughter always startled James.
“Anyway, it was, I believe, the first telling of my cases . . . the first short story about the Sherlock Holmes character, I should say . . . that appeared in The Strand Magazine.”
James had read that story the previous week. It had been in Clara Hay’s collection of Holmes’s stories. Or Arthur Conan Doyle stories . . . James was not sure which description applied to reality, if any reality there was.
“I always suspected that Irene Adler had remained in Washington,” Holmes was saying.
“Why?”
Holmes reminded James of the bouquet of white violets that appeared as if by magic on Clover Adams’s grave every December 6.
“But you’re not rushing to Washington to confront her,” said James. They were approaching Union Station here in the western reaches of Boston.
“No,” said Holmes. “We have tickets for Chicago and much to do there. Besides, the mailing address near Dupont Circle will not be Irene Adler’s address. Only another dead end . . . and this one quite deadly.”
James nodded and made an almost swimming-motion in the air, moving that finished discussion aside.
“May I now tell you the details of what I discovered in Washington this past Saturday?” said James. “I assure you it’s of the utmost importance.”
“We’re at the station already and we have to meet someone here,” said Holmes. “Why don’t you tell me when we get to our first-class carriage? It will just be the three of us.”
“Three of us?” repeated James.
FOUR
Monday, April 10, 4:10 p.m.
To Henry James, the new North railway station
was Boston’s celebration of the modern age. The architecture was noble and the layout oozed common sense: rather than wait outside in the cold and damp under a gigantic open shed roof as in London’s great and small stations, here one went down a ramp inside the sprawling structure, and the train came in to you on a warm and well-ventilated lower level.
When they’d arrived, James had said, “I’ll have to go claim my bags for transfer,” but Holmes had taken the handful of baggage check tickets and said, “I’ll find some expert help in getting that done for us” and had disappeared for only a moment into the Grand Lobby crowd before returning.
“Are you sure . . .” began James. His continuing nightmare was having his steamer trunk or other pieces of his baggage, including the portmanteau filled with beginnings of his stories and the long, thrice-bescribbled scripts for his current and future plays, disappear during one of these American railway adventures. How much happier he would have been, he realized, if both he and his luggage were safely aboard the good ship Spree and safely out of sight of land by now.
Holmes led the way through the mob and down the graceful ramps to where signs announced that their train to Chicago would be leaving in fifteen minutes.
“’Ere you are, Mr. ’olmes, Mr. James, sir,” piped up an unmistakably cockney voice.
James was startled at the sight of a short, rail-thin lad whose unselfconscious grin showed where adult teeth had grown in only to be knocked out. The boy was obviously of that group known in London as “street Arabs” since before Charles Dickens’s day. Yet he was dressed well in English spring tweed suit with tailored jacket and waistcoat, proper knicker trousers and quality wool knee socks, and well-polished quality London-made shoes. Even his cap, which he’d swept off when he’d presented Holmes and James with the baggage cart piled high with their luggage, was new and well-made, probably in Scotland.
“Give the tickets to that porter two coaches down and he’ll arrange our luggage properly,” directed Holmes. “Bring back to our compartment Mr. James’s portmanteau—it has his initials on it—and my briefcase and small tan carrying case.”
“Right you are, guv’ner,” said the boy and disappeared in the gathering crowd, pulling the massive baggage cart behind him.
“You trust that strange child?” asked James.
Holmes gave him a strange half-smile. “More than you can know, James,” he said softly. “More than you can know.”
The detective went to a nearby stand to purchase some newspapers and magazines for the trip, so they hadn’t yet boarded when the boy returned, handing James his portmanteau and Holmes two well-traveled pieces of personal luggage along with a new set of baggage-check slips. The boy stared straight at the author with a look that fell just short of insolence but certainly was not appropriately deferential.
“Nice to see you again, Mr. James,” said the boy. James heard the “Misteh Jimes” and could almost name the streets within hearing distance of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow Church where this young cockney had eked out his living in London.
James thought of all the porters and messengers they’d met or used on this trip, but none matched up with this strangely well-dressed lad—and he was sure he’d never seen the boy before this trip—so he said coolly, “I don’t believe we’ve ever met, young man.”
Again that too-wide, unselfconscious, missing-toothed smile. “But you saw me and I saw you a-seeing me, sir.”
James smiled but shook his head. “I don’t believe so.”
The boarding area had emptied out as most of the rushing passengers up near the first-class cars had already gone aboard to claim their cabins. James and the boy were about ten or twelve feet apart when the youngster walked quickly toward the writer—so quickly and with such a sense of confidence bordering on aggression that James found himself gripping his walking stick with both hands—but the boy stopped only a pace or two in front of James, threw both arms in the air as if he were celebrating something, and, almost faster than the eye could follow, did two arching back handsprings—landing on his hands, flipping even higher to come down on his feet again, and not pausing even an instant there before performing a complete somersault in mid-air, his body descending parallel to the concrete boarding platform in the fraction of a second before Holmes grabbed the spread legs—now wrapped securely around Holmes’s middle—and held the boy poised there horizontally with nothing but Holmes’s powerful fingers and hands keeping him up.
Then Holmes gave a sort of juggler’s cry, the boy put his palms together, arms straight above him as if he were diving into water rather than onto an unyielding concrete platform or iron tracks, and in a display of strength almost beyond James’s comprehension, Holmes gripped the rigid boy’s calves and extended the diver’s form higher than the detective’s or James’s shoulders, then giving another cry—James realized dully that it was one acrobat’s communication with another—he tossed the boy spinning out over the platform, caught him by the ankles, and held the lad there vertically, the boy’s praying hands almost touching the platform.
Then Holmes went to one knee, the boy used that knee as a diving board, and leaped forward in a perfect head-first arc, hugging his knees as he turned in the air, to land lightly on his feet in front of James, arms still over his head.
The movements had jogged James’s memory.
“Good God . . . the two of you . . . the chimney sweeps on the Camerons’ rooftop . . .” gasped James.
Holmes gave one of his quick twitches of a smile.
“You had a Mohawk strip of orange hair,” accused James, pointing at Holmes. “And you, spikes of green hair,” he said to the boy.
“It’s nice to be ’preciated, guv’ner,” grinned the lad.
James was still blinking like a sun-blinded lizard. He turned toward Holmes again. “Why the ‘Flying Vernettis’?”
“My grandmother on my mother’s side was a Vernet,” said Holmes, giving the name its proper French pronunciation. “The Vernets were artists. I felt that the Flying Vernettis sounded suitably acrobatic.”
“To what possible purpose?” cried James. “All that week, Hay and others told me, the two acrobatic chimney sweeps had done the Cabot Lodges’ home, Don Cameron’s where I saw you perform, even Hay’s house where you’d stayed . . .”
“I needed certain documents,” Holmes said coolly. “Old letters, to be precise, although at least one lady’s diary was included. It’s so nice, after the sweeps have laid down newspapers on every surface in m’lady’s boudoir to keep the soot from covering everything, they lock the door to the room and tell servants to stay clear.”
“Those bedroom fireplaces are tiny things . . .” began James.
“Mr. Henry James,” said Holmes stepping forward, “I take great pleasure in introducing you to Wiggins Two.”
James remembered the telegram from Holmes’s brother Mycroft he’d sneakily read—“Wiggins Two arrived safely in New York today.”
“What happened to Wiggins One?” he heard himself asking.
“Oh, he grew up to where he was of no further use to me,” said Holmes.
“Also,” laughed Wiggins Two, “my brother’s in the clink.”
“For what crime?” asked James.
“Ah . . . the Holy Trinity, sir,” said Wiggins Two. “Breakin’, enterin’, and resistin’ arrest. ’E’ll be there a few years, sir.”
“Wiggins Two also answers to the name Moth,” said Holmes. “Sometimes pronounced in the old English form that rhymes with ‘mote’.”
“Since a mere mote but a mighty mote I am indeed, Misteh Jimes,” said the boy.
A conductor stepped down and spoke through a cloud of steam. “It is time to board, gentlemen.”
* * *
It turned out that the Wiggins Two Moth had his own first-class bedroom right next to the one shared by Holmes and James, but the boy stayed in their compartment until the train had left the Boston suburbs behind and they were flashing past small white farms, stone walls, and gre
en pastures.
“Well, I guess I’ll go check on what the Yanks call a club car and round me up a pint,” Wiggins Two said, sliding open the compartment door.
“They won’t sell alcohol to a boy,” said James.
“Oh, no, sir,” agreed the Moth, clinking coins together in his pocket. “But they understand that I’m just fetchin’ a couple of glasses for me two guardians, kindly gentlemen that they are.”
Then they were alone and Holmes leaned forward and spoke to James where he sat dazed on the bench opposite. “You had something private and important to tell me, James.”
Caught off guard, James needed a minute to arrange the events of the previous weekend in succinct but complete form, but then the words came rolling out of him.
“You actually saw Professor Moriarty on the street and followed him?” interrupted Holmes with a tone of amazement.
“Yes, that’s what I’ve been telling you!”
“How did you know it was Moriarty?”
“Because I looked at his photograph in the mathematics-physics magazine at the Library of Congress,” spluttered out James. “And he was photographed in Leipzig just last year, eighteen ninety-two, so I knew you’d lied twice—once to the world with your and Dr. Watson’s tale of you and the Professor dying at Reichenbach Falls, and then you lying to me about having only made up Moriarty—created him as a figment of your imagination, were your exact words. Why did you lie to me, Holmes?”
The detective’s cool, gray gaze met the author’s angry, gray glare.
“Anything I’ve said that distorted the truth in some small way was done to protect you from harm, James,” said Holmes.
“ ‘Distorted the truth in some small way’,” repeated James with a dramatic scoffing noise. “I’d say that denying the existence of Professor James Moriarty and his plans for assassinations and widespread anarchy and riots is a bit more than ‘some small way’!”