Mrs. Sherlock Holmes

by Brad Ricca

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  For my mom

  CAVEAT EMPTOR

  This story is intended for three classes of readers, and no more. It is intended for those who have to bring up children, for those who have to bring up themselves, and for those who, in order that they may think of bettering the weaker, are, on their own part, strong enough to begin that task by bearing a knowledge of the truth.

  For it is the truth only that I have told. Throughout this narrative there is no incident that is not a daily commonplace in the life of the underworld of every large city. If proof were needed, the newspapers have, during the last twelvemonth, proved as much. I have written only what I have myself seen and myself heard, and I set it down for none but those who may profit by it.

  REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN,

  preface to The House of Bondage

  (1910)

  •

  If ever prayer came from the depths of a broken heart,

  it was that forlorn plea for a lost sister.

  EUSTACE HALE BALL, Traffic in Souls:

  A Novel of Crime and Its Cure (1914)

  Prologue

  May 27, 1914

  Pushing through the water, the massive steamship Olympic, sister of the lost Titanic, docked at New York City carrying passengers, thousands of sacks of mail, and the mind of the world’s greatest detective. But that was only part of the truth. As a dark thunderstorm rained down, a burly man in a brown fedora watched from the dock as the four ghostly smokestacks of Olympic seemed to gain more height in the misty air. The man ducked his face and walked with purpose to the tent marked QUARANTINE. As he disappeared past the doors, reporters waited with their cameras, hoping for the opportunity to snap proof of the meeting between this man, William J. Burns, America’s famous detective, and the Olympic’s special passenger that day—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

  When Billy Burns and Doyle clapped hands inside, it was only the second time the two had met since Doyle’s first visit to New York in 1884. Burns had a bushy mustache that readers knew from the newspaper illustrations that accompanied the accounts of his sensational encounters. Doyle’s own, more traditional handlebar was bigger, longer, and framed his squinting eyes in a most natural manner. Lady Jean Doyle, Sir Arthur’s younger wife, smiled at the two men, mirrors of each other’s fictions. A former Secret Service agent, Burns had solved major national cases, including the sad murder of Mary Phagan in Atlanta. Burns had parlayed his fame into the William J. Burns International Detective Agency, with busy branches all across the country. He was often referred to as the American Sherlock Holmes. “There are no mysteries in crime,” Burns once said. “Mysterious disappearances of men and women … they don’t occur, for the simple reason that for every act, be it great or small, there is a motive, hidden though it may be from general knowledge.”

  The Doyles piled into Burns’s auto as he drove them to the Plaza, accompanied by a police escort. As the rain drummed on the roof, Doyle, who was over six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds, looked out into the rising lights of the city. He saw a bright sign for Morton Salt that featured a man with a top hat—and nearly gasped when the hat actually tipped forward. The streets of separate houses had been replaced by buildings with similar signs advertising Blackstone Cigars and Heinz 57 India Relish that were taller than the churches. Doyle heard very few whips, only the grinding of cars. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a dark motorcycle. New York unfolded before him, uncaring of his astonishment, but at the same time thriving on it. Doyle tried to take in all the wide streets and tall buildings. Some, like the Woolworth Building, were over fifty stories high. At the top of all those floors was a gilded apex meant to create the illusion of even greater height. Doyle sat back in his seat and said, half to himself, “I am amazed, fairly paralyzed at the sight of New York.”

  In the warmly lit Plaza, the party moved past walls of Flemish oak decorated with pictures of Bavarian castles. There, under a chandelier made of iron grapes topped by a barmaid hoisting a foamy stein, reporters asked Doyle for his opinions on a myriad of topics. Doyle, who knew he was much loved here, put his hands in his waistcoat and happily obliged the reporters. He said he was looking forward to his few days in New York, before he and his wife would head off to the Selkirk range in Canada for a wilderness adventure. When the questions turned political, Doyle said he admired Colonel Roosevelt a great deal, calling him a superman. The author also had great praise for the New York police—and, of course, his good friend Billy “Hot Tabasco” Burns. Doyle embraced him with laughter. Finally, someone asked about the real news that day, from Doyle’s home, England, where there had been fifty-eight arrests at Buckingham Palace during a suffragist rally. The radicals were attempting to deliver a petition to the royals when fifteen hundred police broke up the demonstration and arrested the group’s leaders. Doyle listened to the question, anxious to answer.

  “Something drastic is sure to happen,” Doyle replied, “and to happen speedily.” Doyle spoke with a sliding, elegant speech that worked its way across the old Scots vowels. “There will be a wholesale lynching bee, I fancy. For the English mob when thoroughly aroused is not a respector of sex, and the woman will have brought down the thunder on their own heads.” The reporters wrote swiftly in their notepads.

  The next day, Doyle and his wife were driven up the river to visit the famous Sing Sing prison. Doyle insisted that he be locked in a solitary cell for five full minutes. Everyone else waited outside. Afterward, he walked down the tight corridor where they kept the prisoners waiting to be executed. In the circular room past that hallway, Doyle raised a pudgy leg and lifted himself into the electric chair itself. Doyle closed his eyes and tried to feel something. Afterward, Doyle laughingly proclaimed that the black chair—“Old Sparky”—had a good-bottomed seat despite its “sinister wires.” Doyle said, slyly, that “it was the most restful time I have had since I had arrived in New York.”

  When they got back to the Plaza, Doyle took a look at some of New York’s famous newspapers. His face turned red as he read them. He was furious that his previous comments on suffragists had not gone over well with the Americans. To clarify his words, Doyle agreed to an interview with Marguerite Mooers Marshall of the New York Evening World.

  “I never said such a thing!” exploded Doyle, once Marshall asked about his quote about a lynch mob supposedly hunting suffragettes. “I am anti-suffrage,” admitted Doyle. “All I meant was that I should not be surprised to hear of a lynching.”

  Lady Doyle, pretty and thin and dressed in pink, leaned in to stop her husband from saying one more word.

  “Please,” Lady Doyle begged Marshall, “don’t say he thinks it would be a good plan to lynch those women.” Marshall looked at Lady Doyle and wondered if she was his actual Watson. Marshall reworded the question in her head and asked Sir Arthur again. “Surely this is just a manifestation of a widespread feminine restlessness and
revolt,” Marshall said. “You are not an opponent of Woman’s Progress?”

  “Certainly not,” retorted Doyle. “I would have women enjoy the best educational opportunities. I would have them enter the arts and the professions they choose.” He thought a moment, before putting what he wanted to say into different words.

  “I like to see a woman with brains who uses them,” gruffed Doyle. “I love and honor women as wives and mothers. But I cannot approve of a campaign of destruction.”

  Lady Doyle added that since Great Britain boasts so many women, if they got the vote they would indeed manage the country. “Who would want to live under the rule of woman?” she asked. She laughed a high sound.

  “Suffragist that I am, I confess I wouldn’t!” agreed Marshall.

  In the piece that followed, Marshall called Doyle the “biggest, blondest, breeziest Englishman we have seen in many a long day. He has that physical fitness kept by so few Americans in late middle life; that erectness and absence of superfluous tissue which mean just one thing—regular outdoor exercise. He played in a hard game of football at the age of forty-two.” Alongside the story ran a cartoon of a lynch mob going after an old woman labeled “suffragette.”

  Later that day, Doyle visited the Tombs, the new eight-story prison located in lower Manhattan. Doyle desperately wanted to meet Charles Becker, the New York City police officer who had been convicted and sentenced to die for the murder of a small-time bookmaker named Herman Rosenthal. The sensational case had held the attention of newspaper readers for months. “It’s against the rules,” said the warden, shaking his head. Instead, Doyle was allowed an extensive private tour. They started on the lowest level, in the furnace room, and worked their way up through closets, coal bins, the cramped exercise yard, and the shadowy grates in the doors that separated murderers from the open world. Doyle searched every corner, according to the Evening World, “just as if they were looking for a clue to some enthralling mystery.”

  Doyle pronounced it “a most superior prison.” “Do you think it would do for the incarceration of suffragettes?” a reporter asked.

  “It would make an excellent place for that,” Doyle replied, with a wink.

  The next day, young suffrage activist Inez Milholland Boissevain read Doyle’s quote. She was angry at it, but she still laughed. She wrote off a response to the papers.

  Sir Arthur is one of the minor novelists, and still more, he is one of the minor prophets. Englishmen of Sir Arthur’s chuckle-headed type say exasperating things like that about the militants one minute, and the next minute beseech them to bury the hatchet. Well, they’ll bury it.

  Doyle read this and harrumphed. This was getting out of hand. The Doyles were leaving for their long vacation soon, but they had a few days left in Gotham to fix this. Doyle knew that his best defense was to fall back on his old practical detective. So the next time he spoke with reporters, Doyle went to his bread and butter. Sherlock Holmes had been his breakthrough as a writer, but, though Doyle was certainly grateful to the old chap, he had retired him in 1893 in “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” where Holmes fell to his apparent death at Reichenbach Falls, locked in combat with his mortal enemy, Professor Moriarty. The irony, Doyle knew, is that it was the frustrating mysteries surrounding Holmes himself that was part of the great draw of his stories. But he was not about to tell his readers that. Sherlock Holmes stories were sellouts whenever they appeared in The Strand, Collier’s, and The American Magazine.

  In truth, Doyle just wanted to write different sorts of books, having articulated Holmes since 1887. But the public was always restless, and perhaps Doyle was too, so he returned to the detective in 1901, resurrecting him outright in 1903.

  “A Cornish fisherman was the worse critic I had,” Doyle told the reporters. “He told me, ‘Well, sur, Sherlock Holmes may not have killed himself falling over that cliff. But he did injure himself something terrible. He’s never been the same since!’” The crowd clapped. Doyle, basking again in the adoration of his readers, couldn’t resist adding that, given the amount of crime he was hearing about in New York, “the history of America would be better if you could get a shipload of Sherlocks over here.” He pronounced it Shrrlock.

  Before he left New York, Arthur Conan Doyle took the time to film brief cameos in several motion pictures. He and his wife appeared for a moment in episode 22 of Our Mutual Girl, a comedic serial detailing the adventures of a young woman in New York. In the short episode, Doyle confers with Burns on a case. Doyle also appeared as himself in both The $5,000,000 Counterfeiting Plot, a dramatic serial about a Burns case, and in Universal Animated Weekly number 117, a more traditional newsreel that covered his arrival in America.

  After filming completed and they said good-bye to Burns, the Doyles left New York. They made their way to Alberta in a private train car—complete with their own parlor—where they sat in chairs and watched as the wilderness rolled out beside them like an endless painting. When they returned home to England, the First World War had begun. By the first of July 1916, the Somme River in France, normally full of rich, flowing water, ran red with blood. The Battle of the Somme cost twenty thousand British soldiers in a single day. One of the men on the edge of these impossible numbers was Kingsley Doyle, Sir Arthur’s son, who was gravely wounded but miraculously survived. He was still recovering from his injuries when the flu came sweeping across Europe in 1918. Kingsley, who was twenty-five, became ill and died. The Doyles were devastated.

  The papers said that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had been, off and on, a proponent and practitioner of spiritualism—that is, the practice of so-called psychical research to communicate with the dead. After his son’s tragic passing, Doyle told friends that he turned back to spiritualism because “the war has shown us the breakdown of nearly every social and religious system we held dear.” He turned out lights, lit candles, and spoke words into the air.

  “Some time ago,” continued Doyle, “I said I knew of thirteen mothers—thirteen—who were receiving direct messages from sons who passed away. Doubt was expressed—gentle doubt—by a newspaper, which asked: ‘Who are the mothers? What are their names?’ Well, I know thirty mothers now who are receiving these messages.

  “Millions of men and women are looking,” Doyle said, “as they never have done before for a sign and a consolation.” The war, and sickness, had brought death to every doorstep at a quicker pace than usual. Parents were looking for their children everywhere they could, even in the corners beyond death. What Doyle was describing was an older, deeper mystery.

  Doyle often quoted Dr. James Hyslop, a psychologist who was active in psychic research through scientific means and logic. Hyslop said that in attempting to communicate with the dead, “all that interests me is that it comes, and that it corresponds with evidence in this world.”

  “There is no death,” claimed the author of Sherlock Holmes. “Only a veil.”

  1

  True Detective Mysteries

  A single electric bulb looped down from the uneven ceiling. It sparked hot white. A man with dark features stepped into the bright circle below it, which lit up a scar near his left eye.

  The dark man palmed his hat and crunched his unlit cigar. He surveyed the entire room, fixing his eyes into its soft, webby corners.

  Hello? he asked. His accent started from a growl and slid upward.

  The room smelled of damp cement, wood, and oil. Two other men followed him in. One was enormous. The other was short and wore overalls. That one looked at everything with keen, moving eyes. He was looking for shiny nails. The fat man perspired. As the dark man searched, the short man knocked on the walls with his knuckles. He listened to the walls as if they were speaking to him.

  He held up a hand and they all stopped.

  There were pipes and a tin sign and some saws on the floor, but otherwise the room was more or less empty, except for a large bench against the wall. In the corner of the room was a bag that they were all staying away from. After a
moment, the dark man began stepping in slow circles on the planked flooring. The others followed him into a corner, where exposed brick lay against the bottom half of the wall. The fat man took off his coat, then his vest.

  The short man in overalls examined the large table. He motioned, and everyone helped him move it. They pushed it to the side and stared downward. The floorboards were missing. Instead, in the cement floor, they saw a door, set into the ground like a gate to hell.

  The dark man dropped to a knee. He pulled back the door and stared down into a black hole in the ground. They listened again for voices. There was no telling where it went.

  Call her, the man said, as he jumped in.

  2

  The Missing Skater

  February 13, 1917

  From the front window of her family’s second-floor apartment, Christina Cruger pressed her face against the glass, looking out on the street below. There was the usual mix of afternoon people in hats and coats on the sidewalk. They were walking with their bags and babies in the bitter February cold. The sun flashed through the clouds over the Hudson and onto Harlem. The snow fell when it wanted to.

  Twenty-year-old Christina wiped away the steam and scraped at the spidery frost on the window. Her lungs strained this close to the cold air, a side effect of her illness. But her worry was growing elsewhere. She could feel it in her stomach.

  When her little sister Ruth had left two hours ago, she was wearing layers of old winter clothes and a floppy hat. She had to run an errand, Ruth told her. So Christina, who was named after her mother, watched her sister leave, as she always did, from the same window: Ruth walked briskly up the hill on Claremont Avenue before she turned east, then crossed Broadway before disappearing behind the wooden buildings. Christina watched those same corners now, looking for her sister’s blue coat, swinging into the scene, framed by the peeling paint of the window frame. But the coat never appeared. This wasn’t like her, thought Christina. Not Ruth, who had just graduated high school with good grades and taught Sunday school. She would just be a minute, Ruth had assured her, with that smile of hers.