A murmur of voices rose in the room, as people there reacted to the captain’s accusation and translated it for their neighbors. Lucy spoke softly to the elders, who shook their heads and looked grave.
Amid the voices, one rose from the back of the room. Tom pushed his way forward, toward the table. His face was pale and exhausted, but its expression resolute. “No—please, no. It wasn’t Nettie, it was me. I—I killed him.”
Captain Belcher answered him with an oath. “What are you talking about, Tom? That girl’s just a murdering savage, boy, let her be.”
Tom turned to face the captain and answered in a stronger voice, “No. No, it’s not right.”
“D——it, Tom,” the captain began, but was interrupted by Sigerson, who said, “Let the boy tell his story.”
“Yes, tell us what happened,” Mayes added.
Reverend Strong offered Tom his chair, but Tom shook his head. Holding the back of the chair with one hand to steady himself, he hesitated for a second or two. Then he raised his head and began. “He—my father—was beating her—you know how he was. He was drunk again—some of the men had made some home brew—and he was playing cards and losing. When he got up and left for the cabin, I followed after him. I knew Nettie—that’s what we called her, because my father couldn’t pronounce her name—I knew she was there that night, and I knew he’d take it out on her. That’s how it’s been all our lives when he was home, when he’d get drunk and take it out on my ma. I thought I’d try—sometimes I can—could stop him by talking to him or getting him angry at me instead. I felt so bad for her. She’s just a little thing, no older than my little sister.
“But he got there, and he was like a wild man. He grabbed her as soon as he saw her, called her a lying, thieving whore, and started punching her. I ran in and tried to pull him off, and he turned on me. He accused me of being sweet on her and—you know—behind his back and all, and then he said he’d kill us both and pulled that harpoon blade of his out of his pocket.
“Nettie ran out and up the stairs to the deck, and he lit out after her. She got off the ship and was running on the snow, getting away from him, but it was windy and dark, and she tripped and fell, and he caught up with her. I yelled to him to stop, and he turned around and grabbed me. I tried to break away, but couldn’t. He was like a madman. I got hold of his knife hand and was struggling to keep him from stabbing me. I kicked him, and he let go of the harpoon, and I got it away from him. But then he ran me over and just fell onto the harpoon head in my hand. It must have stabbed him in a vital spot, because he staggered and let go of me and sat down, slumped over, right there on the snow. I fell down with him.
“I tried to revive him, but he died there in a few moments. Then I sat there, and all I could think about was that I’d just killed my father.” Tom stopped for a moment, overcome, then collected himself and went on. “I didn’t think I could carry him back to the ship, so I looked for a place where I could leave his body until someone could help bring it back. And the wind was howling and the snow was blowing so, and I couldn’t think clearly. There was this little snow house nearby that someone had built, I guess for ice fishing. I could just see it, and I thought maybe I could keep him there. So I dragged him into it. And while I was in it, the ice under me moved, and the snow house started coming down. I jumped up and barely made it out of there. I remember calling out for Nettie because it was starting to storm in earnest, and I was afraid she’d get lost out there, but she didn’t come. I could just see the lights of the ship, and I was barely able to make it back there, half-frozen, and into my bunk.
“It was days before the storm cleared, and when it did, whatever blood or tracks we may have left were gone, and the snow house was so collapsed and buried in snow and ice that there was nothing I could do about his body. I’d had time to think about what I’d done and what might happen if they didn’t believe me, and I was afraid to say anything. I’ve just waited since then, not knowing what to do. I figured that if the ship left before his body was found, I’d leave some sort of note with Reverend Strong, so Nettie wouldn’t be blamed.”
The captain was still incredulous. “But Tom,” he said, shaking his head, “John Sanders, your own father—”
“I never meant to hurt him, sir,” Tom responded. “But you know as well as anyone what he was like.” As he said this, his voice choked, and he broke down in tears.
“Come, sit down,” Strong said, gently, standing and putting an arm around Tom’s shoulders.
“I was thinking of my poor mother,” Tom said, his head in his hands. “What will she do now?”
Lieutenant Edgewater, sitting near me, said under his breath, “Sounds like she’s well rid of him.” To the rest of the table, he said, “I think, based on what Tom here has told us, that we should release the girl.”
Captain Belcher was obdurate. “All we have is his word,” he said. “No other evidence.”
“I can provide some,” Sigerson interjected.
We all turned to him. “All right,” the captain said, “tell us what you have.”
“You saw Sanders’s body, captain.”
“Yes.”
“You did not see this, but when the body was found, it was lying on its back. It was clad in boots, two pair of stockings, long underwear, a shirt, sweater, a wool jacket, but no gloves or hat. In other words, clothing that a man might have been wearing sitting in a cold room, but he was not dressed to go outside. There was evidence of a trail of blood in the ice below the body and some blood beneath the body itself. This suggested that the body had been moved after the fatal wound, but only a short distance. From this I deduced that Mr. Sanders met his end not on the ship but outside, not far from where his body was found.
“As you saw, the single wound was obvious once the clothing was removed from the body. I made an incision into the chest cavity to determine what organs were injured. There was considerable blood and water in the chest cavity, but I was able to determine that the spearpoint had entered just below the rib cage and pierced the aorta. For the killer it was a lucky, or, as Tom described it, an unlucky blow, which caused death in a matter of minutes.
“With the dowel you saw in the wound I traced the track of the spear through the body. It entered a little to the right of his sternum and went left and virtually parallel to the ground, not much upward or down. This would fit with Tom’s account that Sanders ran onto the spear as Tom was holding it in his left hand.
“Finally, there is the issue of the relative heights of Mr. Sanders and whoever stabbed him. Mr. Sanders was about five feet, ten inches tall. Mr. and Mrs. Osborne, may I use you for a moment, for a demonstration?”
Lucy gave me a puzzled look and joined me near Sigerson’s chair.
“Mr. Osborne, how tall would you say you are?” Sigerson asked.
“A bit under six feet.”
“And Mrs. Osborne, you are not much different in height from Neakpuk, true?”
“I think I’m a little taller,” Lucy answered.
“Excellent,” Sigerson answered. “Mr. Osborne, would you do me the favor of removing your parka?” I complied, and he handed Lucy the harpoon point. “Hold it at your waist and approach Mr. Osborne. There—perfect. Now thrust the blade—gently, it is still sharp—toward your husband’s abdomen, as if you were going to stab him. Stop when the point of the weapon touches his body—ah, there, exactly! Look how much below his ribs the blade rests.” It was true; the point of the harpoon had come to rest below my belt.
“Now, Mrs. Osborne,” Sigerson continued, “please lift your arm or hand as if you were going to stab your blade into Mr. Osborne in the location where Mr. Sanders was stabbed.”
Lucy did as he asked, and Sigerson pointed a long finger at the position of her hand. “Notice how unnatural the arm is,” he said. “You must see that this is not a manner in which anyone would stab another person, nor one in which an assailant would have any strength behind the blow.”
Lieutenant Edgewater sp
oke up. “Thank you, Professor. It appears to me that your postmortem effectively rules out Neakpuk as Mr. Sanders’s killer.” He turned to face the captain. “Captain Belcher, I truly believe we should call the incident self-defense and pursue it no further.”
Captain Belcher, seeing from our faces that the weight of our general opinion was with the lieutenant, yielded, and said, with some reluctance, “I guess you’ve proved your case.”
Lucy and Mrs. Strong gave Neakpuk the news that she was free again. The poor girl seemed scarcely to understand what had happened, but when it was made clear to her that the white men no longer believed she had killed Sanders and she was free to go, she hesitated only a moment at the door before running to a pair of girls among the people waiting outside the house. Talking animatedly, the three of them walked away together toward the village.
We buried Sanders the next day under a cairn of stones in the little Christian graveyard near the settlement. I made a cross for his grave and painted it white in the Russian style, and Mrs. Strong drew a sketch of the grave for Tom to take to his mother. Sigerson expressed an interest in buying the ivory harpoon head from Tom, but Tom insisted on giving it to him. “It wasn’t mine,” he said, “and I couldn’t take money for it, after what I did.”
As the weather continued to warm, leads of open water began appearing in the ice. The Myra left as soon as her captain could free her from the ice in the bay. I had hardly finished copying Professor Sigerson’s notebooks and logs when the revenue cutter Bear, arrived with the winter’s mail and news. Sigerson, Mayes, and Bergsson were to sail on the Bear to Anchorage, and before he left, Sigerson asked me to keep my copy of his records. He gave me the name and address of a friend of his in London. “Send him the copy,” he told me, “if you don’t hear from me by the summer of next year.”
On the day the Bear left, many of us gathered to say farewell. Mr. and Mrs. Strong were there, with their two oldest children, as were Lieutenant Edgewater and Mr. Harris from the weather station and Neakpuk. Tungweruk and his wife were also in the crowd of well-wishers. Tungweruk’s wife was wearing a new dress of blue-flowered calico—the best of our small stock of yard goods—over her parka, and the baby sleeping in her hood was bigger. Watching as the last of our visitors’ goods were loaded onto the ship, I felt more than a little sad to see them go.
But I digress. What I wanted to tell you is that not only can a dozen or more people, including Lieutenant Edgewater, Mr. and Mrs. Strong, Tungweruk and Neakpuk, Lucy and I, vouch that Professor Sigerson was here at Cape Stevenson and that he set out from here on his expedition, but I still have the copy of Sigerson’s notebooks and logs. I have written a letter to Professor Sigerson’s friend in London, to go out with this one on the Bear, asking his permission to send you my copy of the professor’s expedition records. If I get permission from him I will send them. It is unlikely that his reply will reach me before next spring, however. In the meantime, I hope that you will accept my word regarding the existence of the professor and the authenticity of his accomplishments. Please send my regards to Mr. Mayes.
Respectfully,
John L. Osborne
The Case of the Lugubrious Manservant
A Sherlock Holmes Story
Rhys Bowen
An hour’s stiff walk up a wooded path will bring you to a pleasant little hostelry called The White Horse Inn (Gasthaus Zum Weissen Rossli). The inn is superbly situated on a bluff which affords an excellent outlook over the town of Interlaken and the lakes of Brienze and Thun. The food is simple but plentiful, the beds clean and decked with Luxurious feather quilts, the hosts congenial and the view breathtaking. All in all a splendid retreat from the cares of the world.
—Everyman’s Guide to Switzerland, Cassels Publishers, London 1890
The man sitting at the rustic outdoor table feasted his eyes on the view below. The valley lay half-hidden in a rosy autumnal haze through which twin lakes glinted in the morning sun. The pine forest surrounding the inn was dotted with the bright yellow of an occasional beech or birch. The sun was warm on his face. He stretched out his legs and sighed with contentment. He was slim, dark-haired, with a neat beard and serious countenance. His attire was rather too somber and citified for the occasion, although the one concession he had made to his surroundings was a jaunty Tirolean hat.
“A beautiful day, don’t you agree, Herr Doktor?”
The man wrenched his eyes from the view as the landlady of the inn approached, bearing a tray laden with freshly baked rolls, yellow butter, a dish of strawberry jam, and a large pot of coffee.
“It is indeed, Frau Muller,” the man replied, now feasting his eyes on the food being placed before him, “and the air here is so bracing, it gives one a splendid appetite.”
The landlady smiled benignly as she poured his coffee and watched him attack the first of the rolls. “You must be glad to be away from that smoky, noisy city,” she said. “I only went to Lucern once in my life, but that was enough for me. Not enough room to breathe freely, if you get my meaning.”
The man brushed a crumb fastidiously from his beard, then patted at the sides of his mouth with his napkin. “You are right, Frau Muller. If I had my choice, I should not live in a big city like Vienna. Unfortunately, my chosen profession dictates that I live close to one of the great centers of medical research.”
“Are you still studying then?” the woman asked, readying herself for a good gossip. “You are not yet a fully qualified doctor?”
“I foresee that I will be studying for the rest of my life,” he said, “as there is so much still to learn. However, I have been a practicing physician for some time now and also am about to become a professor at the university.”
“Such high achievements for one so young,” she said.
He smiled, and the smile did indeed make him look youthful. “I am nearer to forty than thirty,” he said, “but you are correct. I have often been considered too young to be taken seriously by my colleagues. Some of my papers have been ridiculed.”
“Papers? Like newspapers, you mean?”
“I have published papers in my field of specialization, which is the diseases of the mind.”
“Can the mind be sick as well as the body?” she asked.
The doctor smiled. “Not all diseases have a physical origin. Diseases of the mind can affect our behavior and physical well-being to an extent that you would not believe. I have treated patients who cannot walk, but for no physical reason. Their minds have paralyzed them. My colleague, Dr. Breuer and I have been treating a young girl whose hysteria has rendered her unable to use her native German, but allows her to converse in French and English. What do you make of that, huh?”
“Amazing. Scarcely to be believed.” She shook her head. “And can these diseases of the mind be cured then, with medicine?”
“This is what I hope to achieve in my lifetime, Frau Muller,” the doctor said. “Breuer and I have tried hypnosis, with moderate success, but I am of the opinion that the cure lies in the understanding of the patient’s past. I am currently conducting experiments in the interpretation of dreams. I believe that we dare to express in dreams those things that are too disturbing to be allowed into our conscious mind.”
“Fancy that.” Frau Muller tried to appear interested, but clearly this was going over her head.
She looked up as a door opened and a tall thin man crossed the yard, bearing a wood basket.
“If you were not on holiday, Herr Doktor, I would say that we have a case for you here,” she said, her eyes following the tall thin fellow. “Our Fritzi over there—a poor tormented creature if ever I saw one.
“The manservant who carried in my bags last night?” the doctor inquired.
She nodded. “A poor simple half-wit, if ever I saw one.”
The doctor smiled. “I’m afraid medical science can do nothing to improve the intelligence of half-wits. They are unfortunately born without the brain capacity of the rest of us.”
“But
this one has an interesting history,” she went on, now bold enough to perch her large person on the edge of the bench opposite. “He came to us but half a year ago, at my sister’s request. It was her husband who found this fellow sprawled on a rock in the middle of a rushing torrent. At first my brother-in-law thought the man was dead, and indeed he was more dead than alive. He must have had a nasty blow to the head, for when he opened his eyes, he had lost the power of speech and understanding. He stared like a vacant soul. He had no recollection of who he was or how he came to fall into the river. So bad was he, in fact, that they were all set to have him sent to the mental asylum. But my sister took pity on him, knowing that terrible place would be the end of him. She came to me and asked if we couldn’t perhaps take on an extra manservant to help my husband with the chores. She begged me to give him a chance, and so we did.”
The doctor was listening intently now. “You say he lost his memory following a blow to the head and a near drowning?”
“So we believe, Herr Doktor, although, of course, the fellow could have been born a simpleton and never had the brains to know his name or situation.”
“And he still has recovered no memory of his past life, after several months?”
The landlady shook her head. “None at all. But his speech does improve, slowly but surely. At first he appeared hardly to understand a word we said. I wondered, between you and me, whether the blow to the head had not maybe affected his hearing. Now he understands us, but on the level of a child. One must speak slowly and gently to him. But worst of all is the terrible melancholy—the way he sits and stares with those hollow eyes. It fair breaks the heart, Herr Doktor. If there was anything you could do for him, anything at all …”
The doctor’s gaze followed the servant returning from the woodshed, bearing a basketful of logs. “I had sworn that I was on holiday and wouldn’t touch a book or a paper, but his case intrigues me. I will speak to the fellow, if you wish. Of course, I can’t promise anything.”
Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years Page 13