Best and Wisest Man

by Hamish Crawford

  “You’ve considerably helped me too, Arthur.”

  “Aye. Without good friends, I tell you,” Arthur said, “All you’ve got are your weaknesses and then, there you go. My father’s still around, but he doesn’t have long [12]. And your brother went the same way. No one can understand if they haven’t seen it themselves.”

  Louise put a sympathetic hand on Arthur’s shoulder, but he pulled himself up stoically and raised a glass. “It is Hogmanay, so perhaps it would be appropriate. How about a toast as we bid farewell to the year to all those absent friends?”

  So we did, to Henry Watson, to Isadore Whitney, and lastly to Sherlock Holmes.

  12 Charles Altamont Doyle did indeed pass away in 1893.

  1893

  “Your fatal habit of looking at everything from the point of view of a story instead of as a scientific exercise has ruined what might have been an instructive and even classical series of demonstrations. Your slur over work of the utmost finesse and delicacy, in order to dwell on details which may excite, but cannot possibly instruct, the reader.”

  -‘The Abbey Grange’ (1904)

  12 January -It has been a slow start to this New Year. Truly I have felt very frail ever since I returned from Switzerland. At first I believed it was simply because that time had been so joyous and physically invigorating, but as the weeks have passed I am beginning to worry about other things. This may be my new permanent condition, or it may even pave the way for still worse declines. At the moment there is no particular reason to worry though. I have not troubled James with it, as he has been hit rather hard with returning to a full workload and more Strand obligations.

  Arthur has helped him considerably with the polishing of his manuscripts for what are now being called The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. He has been over most nights, and James will frequently finish a long day’s work as a physician before rolling up his sleeves and toiling away on getting a Holmes case into narrative order.

  It is quite a captivating spectacle to watch the two men at work together. James has ample concentration, but needs Arthur’s polish to put the accounts into a pleasing form. While Arthur has the more inventive prose style, he is the more easily distracted. Therefore, their collaboration is very congenial to both.

  Today, for instance, he asked whether we had read in the paper of some of the exploits of a Norwegian by the name of Sigerson. “A very prodigious traveller - he has passed through Persia, Mecca, even as far as Khartoum. Now there is a fascinating character. I sometimes think when we finish these Sherlock Holmes accounts, I shall pen a tale of explorers, discovering some unknown corner of the globe. Somewhere even more exotic than Khartoum.”

  “Yes, well, let’s get these finished before you start thinking about what you’ll be doing next!” was James’s exasperated reply.

  I feel it is a great pity, but both men are adamant that this new series of twelve should be the end of the Holmes publications. James has selected the best examples of his friend’s gifts - including two, that I am quite thrilled to read, from Holmes’s University days - and believes that ‘The Naval Treaty’, with its international intrigue, and particular deductive feats on the part of Holmes, is the perfect finale for the series.

  “Is there any chance that you shall write of ‘The Final Problem’?” Arthur asked, with considerably more tact than the question appears written down.

  Something of the emotion that had so tortured James resurfaced. “I know you may think my reasons for not wishing it published are entirely personal.”

  “My dear,” I interjected, “surely you may publish whichever stories you want.”

  “I concur, and please don’t think I meant to stir up those old ghosts for you,” Arthur quickly added.

  “It is not that, although a part of me does think it is right to spare the reading public the … the unvarnished grief that the incident stirs with me. Part of me feels that it would be … rather nice for everyone to think that Holmes is still alive and well. But no, I do not think of those reasons. I merely think the concept of Professor Moriarty, and his sinister web of crime, is best left unrecorded.”

  “Why?” Arthur asked. “Moriarty is dead too remember, all the remaining members of his gang were caught by the police.”

  “That we know of,” James cautioned. “But no - to learn of such all-encompassing ill descending on London. It is one thing to report on crimes of an individual nature, but it is quite another and, I think, a more unsettling matter to have the bulwark of society and civilization revealed to have such a serpent lurking in its midst. Indeed, even controlling it. Moriarty is an unsettling idea, and I would rather he remain unrevealed.”

  Arthur agreed at James’s assessment and the two men quickly began talking of ‘The Naval Treaty’, and organizing Holmes’s two first-person accounts - those University anecdotes, entitled ‘The “Gloria Scott”’ and ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ - into a more thrilling, less academic style.

  “That was Holmes to the end,” James chuckled. “No doubt even from beyond the grave he will be withering at my attempts to turn ‘what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales’.”

  31 January -Very sad news indeed today. Louise’s illness has not abated, and it seems likely she has contracted tuberculosis. Arthur has been inconsolable, and has withdrawn from further work on the Holmes stories to care for his wife. I believe this dreadful news has affected him even more personally. He berates himself in the harshest possible turns, going on that he should have seen the signs when she gave birth to Kingsley, and his medical skill has again let him down. I think he is being still harder on himself because it was the very disease he had wanted to specialize in.

  In any event, and with most of the remaining Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes prepared for publication, Arthur has retreated to Switzerland again. It has strengthened his resolve that he has neither the time nor the inclination to publish further Sherlock Holmes cases. Mr. Greenhough Smith, ever chipper, said to him as we bade them farewell: “For the sake of Holmes, for the sake of my readers, Arthur, you must get your wife well again! That’s an order, damn you!”

  My own condition grows worse, and though it seems selfish to dwell on it in the wake of a dear friend facing something so intractably hopeless. Little Mary was most distressed, as she has become very close with the Conan Doyles’ daughter Mary Louise, and the child has been dreadfully sad about the whole business.

  “You’ll soon get better, won’t you Mummy?” she asked me.

  “You can depend on it,” I assured her. Though lately I have been dubious - every day does seem to deteriorate on the day before it.

  17 February - For the first time in many months, I travelled to Camberwell to visit Mrs. Forrester. Though she has a slight cramp that has given her a stick, she is still the same healthy and energetic woman I knew and loved so well.

  “You have let me down awfully, Mary,” she mockingly scolded me. “When can I expect you to resume your post as governess? The ladies I’ve had to replace you are fairly hopeless. And the students don’t seem to respond as well to them as to your fair features.”

  “I hope I was more than just a pretty face to my pupils,” I rebutted.

  “Ah, Mary, there is no disguising your serious moods. You do get so very serious.” Mrs. Forrester seemed to see something in me, something I was not aware of myself.

  I explained to her about Louise Doyle, and how I seemed to be so very enervated of late. “Therefore, Mrs Forrester … knowing you and valuing your friendship so highly…”

  “Please Mary, the friendship is equally valued on my part. Anything I can do to be of service, you need only name it.”

  “Well, I anticipate … in the worst-case scenario, I may leave my daughter, my dear little Mary, without a mother. It is about her that I worry. And though I am sure James would be perfectly capable and willing a parent, there are some aspects of his life that are not congenial to the rearing of a child.”

  “Say no more - I’ve
always thought he could never be as full a husband or father as you and Mary deserved with Sherlock Holmes sharing his affections.”

  In line with James’s wishes, I had not even told my dearest friends of Holmes’s current whereabouts. As well as his personal problems coming to terms with this, he also rationalized that if it was known Holmes was dead, the criminal community would rejoice, and it may even lead to a resurgence of Moriarty’s organization (one or two members, he was sure, had evaded justice). It was another reason he did not wish to publish ‘The Final Problem’ - he wished Holmes to remain an immortal symbolic bulwark against evil in all its forms.

  Sitting in Mrs. Forrester’s Camberwell sitting room, though, this explanation was very inconvenient. Therefore I had to sit in silence and suppress my sorrow to hear his name so besmirched by my good friend.

  “That aside, Mrs. Forrester - though with your objections noted - I wonder if I could rely upon you to take little Mary into your care.”

  “It would be utmost honour, Mary. In fact, I have always considered myself a mother to you.”

  “I have thought of you that way also,” I hastily added.

  “So it would be second nature to take another Morstan into my care, and if I had any hand in making you half the lady you are today - so very kind and generous, and loving to Dr. Watson, which I hope he appreciates - I should be happy to make the same contribution to the next generation.”

  “I am deeply in your debt, Mrs. Forrester.”

  “Not at all!” she exclaimed, her sincerity once more coated in her trademarked bluster. “We are talking about an extremely hypothetical situation. And I for one think it will be more likely that you will be banging on my door in a couple of months looking for work. And as I’ve said before, with the sorry lot I have now I’ll be forced to take you on no matter what extortionate terms you ask!”

  With perfect timing, at this point one of Mrs. Forrester’s hapless governesses entered the room with her face covered in India ink. “I can’t handle them monsters!” she declared in thinly concealed Cockney.

  21 March - James has been much distressed by an item today in the Pall Mall Gazette. Sadly, if inevitably, the incredible fame of Sherlock Holmes has attracted some unsavoury attention.

  Colonel Moriarty Attacks Sherlock Holmes, Defends Brother’s Legacy

  It seems these days vulgar celebrity is allowed to excuse all manner of unsavoury personal behaviour. Month after month, the readers of the Strand Magazine thrill to the exploits of the detective Sherlock Holmes. The Prince of Wales himself is rumoured to be among their number. So skilful is the writing and presentations of his actions that they have become misunderstood, to the extent that many of his readers believe him to be a fictional character.

  If only he were, I think to myself with a heavy heart!

  Even on his own, this detective cuts rather a sinister figure. He has all of the trappings of a gentleman but none of the proprieties. He scorns respectability; he makes a mockery of the conduct and deportment our society is founded upon; he treats our most sacred institutions with suspicion; he will consort with lowly ruffians in the pursuit of his dubious aims. Were I not informed of his friend and colleague Dr. John Watson’s marriage, I would also regard his erstwhile living arrangements with this gentleman highly questionable as well.

  However, all of these characteristics - though no doubt objectionable to citizens of any common decency - are no more than his personal choices. I do not wish to censure Mr. Holmes for this. I was, however, grieved that a private correspondence I had written to a friend found its way into a newspaper, and was given a suitably gaudy headline. My letter merely expressed similar opinions to those I have written above, and I feel as a citizen in a free country, I need not apologize for having expressed them. However, the opprobrium that greeted my words was such that I have become a pariah.

  The purpose of this open letter, therefore, is to make public allegations against Mr. Holmes that simply cannot stand unchecked. The good name of my family - that of Moriarty - has been stained by its involvement and persecution from this incorrigible rogue. Worse, I have lost a brother.

  The facts are these. In the later months of last year, Mr. Holmes used his unjustly lauded reasoning skills to make the grotesque and wholly unfounded allegation that my brother, a respected former Chair of Mathematics at Dundee University, orchestrated and enacted criminal enterprises. The scope of these schemes was international and the motivation unclear.

  Using the leverage his previous victories have afforded him with Scotland Yard officials, Holmes was able to launch a probe, without any foundation, into Professor Moriarty’s activities. By their own admission, the C.I.D. found no evidence whatsoever of even circumstantial evidence to match the gravity of these charges. One Inspector MacDonald made repeated inquiries about Professor Moriarty.

  Had the matter ended there, it would have been an embarrassment and an inconvenience only. Even the mild harassment would, in this context, be tolerable. But Holmes would not accept his failure, and refused to let the matter rest. The severity and intensity of his persecution continued, until Professor Moriarty saw no alternative but to convene an interview with Holmes. This he did quite literally fearing for his life - a fear that our family now knows was all too justified.

  Mr. Holmes plainly stated to the Professor that he saw no alternative conclusion to their status quo but to act as an executioner, in order to rid the world of the invidious presence of such a master criminal. Again, it chills my bones - as a retired soldier and an Englishman - that there are in our civilization men who feel justified in perverting the law solely to satisfy an insane blood lust. Worse, that the law would actively allow such a deranged individual to pursue this course of action.

  Not surprisingly, I think, Moriarty fled England altogether, telling no one of his movements (not even myself). It may seem an extreme reaction but it attests, I think, to the raw and unvarnished terror that the Professor now held.

  But, as readers of his chronicles in the Strand are all too aware, Holmes is no ordinary mortal. He was able to piece together the Professor’s secret flight and continue his pursuit. That he could apply his admittedly impressive skills to such an aim is nothing short of perverse, and speaks to me of the depth of his aberrant mental condition.

  It was at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland that Holmes finally caught up with Professor Moriarty. There, his harassments continued to physical violence, which ended with both men tumbling into the Falls to their deaths. The matter of Holmes’s death has for some reason been little reported. A brief précis in the Journal de Geneve and a Reuter’s dispatch are the only accounts I am able to find, and shamefully both seem to imply that this was some unforeseeable accident, rather than the outcome of systematic persecution from a dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual.

  Seeing as these reports were little circulated (apparently Holmes’s brother is a government official, another testament to the insidious infiltration of the Holmes family into our respected seats of power), I finally would like to set the record straight. My brother was a dedicated and brilliant scholar. Military and academic colleagues have sent their sympathies from far and wide at his passing. Colonel Sebastian Moran, a business associate and family friend, spoke fondly of the Professor’s meticulous nature, his taste in art, and also the high standard he brought to all his work. “The Professor often said that the mark of a true master was invisibility. He did not wish to be in limelight, but off to the side, to effect change from the background.”

  A fellow scholar, John Clay - a peer of the realm who was sent to jail by Holmes’s chicanery - said, “Professor Moriarty had great ambitions. It is a great sorrow to me that he never had the opportunity to leave his mark on the world as he ought to have. Mark my words, the scope of his vision would have created a great change that would have reverberated across all England.”

  I appreciate such words, but as you may imagine, they are a small consolation as I continue to live with t
he turmoil of a dear brother, taken from me so very senselessly. I hope all readers, and all Englishmen, can understand how very obscene it is that his murderer is so valorized.

  Sincerely,

  Colonel James Moriarty

  I had to say that when he threw the paper on the table in front of me, I frankly told James that it was of little merit, and he should not worry over it. “The whole thing is so patently false. Even the most casual reader of Sherlock Holmes’s stories would recognize the falsehood of Colonel Moriarty’s claims. It is quite simply your word against his, and few would have any reason to take him at his word. And even this Colonel’s character makes me suspicious. Did not Professor Moriarty have the Christian name of James?”

  “Oh, Mary! I wish I could believe you!” he cried. I have truly never seen James fume with anger, pain, and sorrow quite so raw as after he read this letter.

  I tried my best to reassure him. “Please, James, no one will pay him any heed. After all, everyone in England - and America, even - knows and loves Sherlock Holmes. And you and I know the true events.”

  “It is so terribly unjust, Mary. The indignity of it - attacking my dear friend, who cannot even defend himself! To think that he died, and respect cannot even be paid to what he died in the aid of!”

  “We both know of the depth of Professor Moriarty’s actions,” I said, careful at the sentiment I was expressing. “However … is it not in some ways reasonable that the man’s own kin would take an unfavourable view of Holmes? No one with a keen awareness of Moriarty’s criminal activities would risk defending his actions so publicly.”

  “But what he said about Holmes! Had he restricted himself to his brother’s reputation, I would have seen it for the lie it was, but I might have understood it as you say - even if I would still have found it morally repugnant. And without full possession of the facts, it would be very easy to turn the tide of public opinion against him. To think! While Moriarty was weaving his trail of mayhem and destruction - even the dreadful attentions he paid you that day before we went off to chase him to Switzerland! Did anyone protest against his actions then? Did anyone bring him to the account he deserved? No, only Holmes saw him for what he was! And we are left to accept this lie, given out publicly behind this colonel’s sanctimonious grief!”