The thin cheeks colored with intense emotion as the solicitor continued. “You must believe me, Mr. Holmes,” he said with solemn-faced earnestness, “when I assure you that neither I nor anyone in my family has the slightest claim upon the Scrooge estate. It is my sole and dearest wish to administer the estate as Mr. Scrooge intended, and to carry out to the letter every clause and codicil of his will.”
“And what, precisely, does that will provide, sir?” Holmes puffed on his pipe, sending a cloud of foul-smelling tobacco into the close air of the parlor. “Or should I ask, rather, for whom does that will provide?”
“Ah, there’s the heart of it, right enough, Mr. Holmes. You have struck straight at the marrow of the matter and dug out its meat. Whom does the will benefit? Cui bono, as the ancients would have it?”
“You are well-educated, sir,” Holmes remarked.
“All that I am,” the solicitor replied with becoming humility, “I owe to my generous benefactor. But for him, I should not even be alive to breathe the air of London on this day. But,” he said, “I stray from my theme, and yet, sir, I do not, for everything good that Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge did for me he did three and four times over for his own nephew, Mr. Fred, and what, I ask you, sir, could be more natural?”
“Then I take it Mr. Fred Scrooge—for I believe the young man took his uncle’s surname so as to keep that fine old English name alive—I take it Fred Scrooge was the elder Scrooge’s chief heir?”
“He was, Mr. Holmes. As was only right and natural, he being the only living blood relative Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge possessed. Mr. Fred,” he went on, his face clouding, “was widowed young. His lovely wife, whom I looked upon as a second mother, was taken ill and died, without issue, meaning that there were no children, Mr. Holmes.”
“I believe Mr. Fred Scrooge decided to pursue the firm’s business in the Far East after his wife’s death,” Holmes remarked. It was always astonishing to me how many details of London life Holmes knew, without seeming to take an interest in anything outside of his test tubes and cigar ashes. “I take it the present situation arises from that decision in some manner.”
“You are correct, Mr. Holmes. While in India, Mr. Fred met a young woman. He was no longer young himself, being approximately the age I am now, but he fell in love with this lady and married her in Calcutta. Naturally, old Mr. Scrooge was too infirm to make the trip, so Mr. Fred was unattended by any of his family at the service. He planned to return to England with his bride, but she was confined almost at once and gave birth to a child, a son.”
“Was old Mr. Scrooge still alive at this time?”
“Yes, sir, very much so. Hale and hearty in spite of his years. He looked forward very much to entertaining Mr. Fred and his new family, but somehow or other every visit that was planned failed to materialize. Either the boy or the wife or Mr. Fred himself became ill, or there was too much press of business, or the war had broken out again and no passenger ships were sailing. For whatever reason, Mr. Ebenezer died without ever seeing his grand-nephew.”
“I note that you do not refer to Mr. Fred Scrooge’s wife or son by name, Mr. Cratchit.”
“Ah, you note at once that which it has taken me several years to realize, Mr. Holmes. My own correspondence with Mr. Fred was confined to legal matters, for the most part, although he always asked after my own family most cordially. He said little regarding his own family life, and I, out of delicacy, forebore to ask. Only lately have I come to realize how little I actually know about Mr. Fred’s wife and child.”
“And to what, pray, does that circumstance point?” Holmes steepled his fingers and spoke softly, inviting me to engage in his favourite pastime of deduction.
“Plain as a pikestaff, Holmes.” I puffed on my pipe. “Marriage beneath his station. I saw it any number of times in my brief Army service. A young lieutenant, fresh from England, set upon by the daughter of a low-ranked soldier and married before he knew his way about. Trapped for life in a marriage of unequals.”
“There is no hint of such a thing in Mr. Fred’s letters,” Cratchit protested. He reached inside his coat pocket and pulled out a bundle of letters tied with ribbon. Handing them to Holmes, he said, “You will note several references to the boy’s health and his education at St. James’s Academy in Lahore. I urge special attention to the second letter, which informs Mr. Ebenezer of the marriage.”
Holmes undid the ribbon and opened the letters, reading with such quickness I was certain he could not possibly absorb the contents, yet within a minute his eyes left the paper and stared at Cratchit with astonishment. “It says here,” he recited, “that Fred Scrooge acquired a ‘most precious emerald’ from a local maharajah. The newspaper makes no mention of stolen jewels, but I take it you are concerned that the rightful heir has not only been stripped of the proof of his identity, but of a valuable gem.”
“Indeed, Mr. Holmes. I had expected to know Mr. Fred’s heir not only because he would show proof of his birth, but because he would bring this emerald as a pledge.” The solicitor reached into his pocket yet again and this time withdrew a telegram, sent from India.
ARRIVING STAR OF RAJPUT STOP IN COMPANY OF EMERALD STOP PLEASE TO MEET SHIP. A. SCROOGE
“So we know the boy’s name begins with the letter A,” I remarked unnecessarily.
“If this telegram was sent by the genuine Mr. Scrooge, that is,” Cratchit corrected.
Holmes returned to his interrogation. “I take it the elder Mr. Scrooge never met his nephew’s wife or child.”
“Correct, Mr. Holmes. Some nineteen years passed, and then Mr. Fred himself died without ever returning to his native land. Enteric fever,” Cratchit added and I groaned, for I had barely escaped with my life from that debilitating disease, the curse of our Eastern possessions.
“Where are these two claimants now?” Holmes asked, his eyes alight with the joys of the hunt.
“One is in residence at the Army and Navy Club,” Cratchit replied, “and the other, as you already deduced, is staying at the Oriental Club. I have appointments with each, and I hope Dr. Watson will accompany me to the Army and Navy Club, for his knowledge of a certain orderly is bound to be of enormous assistance.”
My heart leapt within my breast. “Murray?” I said with great excitement. “The man who brought me to the base hospital at Peshawar?”
“That is what he claims, in any case,” Cratchit said with an enigmatic smile.
“Let us go at once.” Holmes jumped from his chair in his usual manner of accepting a case, which is to say, he pounced upon it like a cat upon a fat mouse, not giving it time to get away. “We shall unmask the impostor and toast the true heir by the end of this day.”
“I pray you are correct, Mr. Holmes,” Cratchit said. “It is a poor solicitor who does not know his own client.”
Holmes wrapped his muffler around his neck, threw his cloak over his shoulders and was out the door hailing a cab before Cratchit and I managed to extricate ourselves from our chairs.
The solicitor reached for his stick and leaned heavily upon it as he rose; it seemed to me his leg grew more infirm with the passage of the day, and he limped rather badly as we made our way to the hansom cab Holmes had secured for our journey. But then, my own hip gave a twinge of pain as I hoisted myself into the cab. As we bounced along Baker Street toward St. James’s Square, I found myself grateful that this case was unlikely to involve physical violence, for poor Holmes was assisted, not as he should have been, by men of strength and agility, but by two cripples.
Perhaps it was the lowering clouds, promising snow before morning, and the bitter damp cold that turned my thoughts so bleak. Perhaps it was the forcible reminder of my injury and illness in the East, but something in me curdled and shrank as we drove toward the Army and Navy Club, as if all joy had left the festive season even as its most tender representative sat beside me in the cab, rubbing his leg and gazing out the window with an expression of muted pain upon his thin visage.
The front entrance to the Arm
y and Navy Club boasts an ornate grand staircase of white marble, graced with elaborate brass railings and featuring a huge painting of half-clad nymphs. We turned to the left and entered the coffee room, which was furnished with dark, oversized chairs and smelled of leather and smoke.
A hand on my arm stopped my progess toward the fire.
“Do you recognize anyone in this room, Doctor?” Cratchit whispered in my ear.
I gazed around the room; soldiers old and young, mustachioed and clean-shaven, sat in chairs and smoked. They read books or newspapers, or chatted in quiet tones. They were all, so far as I could tell, complete strangers.
“Should I recognize anyone?”
“I should think,” Holmes said sotto-voce, “that you might have cause to remember the man who saved your life.”
I looked about, but did not see anyone I knew.
“I—it was a few years ago,” I mumbled, ashamed of myself. “I was injured and, though I did not know it at the time, I was ill as well. No doubt his features failed to impress themselves upon me.”
“Or perhaps, Watson,” Holmes said, his lips barely moving, “the man you knew as Murray is not in this room, and someone else has taken his name and identity.”
“And if Murray is not the genuine article,” I finished, “then this supposed Mr. Scrooge must be a bald-faced impostor as well.” Anger swept through me; how could any man stoop so low as to impersonate a true hero?
“Not necessarily, Watson,” Holmes admonished. Without waiting for a signal from Cratchit, he strode to the corner of the room and presented himself to a young man with hair of burnished gold, who sat at his ease, his long legs outstretched in a most uncivil manner.
“Mr. Scrooge, I presume?”
The young man looked down his nose at Holmes without bothering to rise from his chair. “You do, sir, you do.”
“And this, I take it, is Sergeant Murray, about whom my friend Dr. Watson has told me so much.”
The sallow little man in the chair opposite started at the name, and looked about him as if for a place of safety. He was a stranger to me, for the Murray I remembered had been tall and broad of shoulder, dark-haired and bushy-eyebrowed.
“I—I never said I was that Murray,” he stammered. “Indeed, Mr. Holmes, I am a different Murray entirely. No connexion whatever to Dr. Watson.”
“But that is not what you told this impressionable young lad, now, is it?”
The impressionable young lad stared long and hard at his companion. “So, you are not the man you purport to be? You dared take another and a better man’s identity for your own unscrupulous ends? Get away from me, and do not return.”
The sallow little man rose from his chair and said, “I’ll go, Mr. Scrooge-I-don’t-think. But before you call others impostors, it might be well to examine your own conscience.”
He walked away with an oddly touching air of dignity, leaving us with the young man, who remembered his manners sufficiently to invite us to sit and to order coffee and sandwiches.
Questions were put by both Holmes and Cratchit, answered with some show of sullenness by the young man. Documents were taken from an oilskin pouch and examined in great detail by Cratchit as to legal particulars and by Holmes, who produced a large magnifying glass for the purpose.
I myself had no doubt of the young man’s falseness, but I could not see how Holmes was to prove the matter. The documents in the oilskin pouch appeared genuine enough; as the only man present who had been to India, I vouched for the official seals and stamps and proclaimed the paper to be Indian-made.
“Perhaps,” Cratchit said in a tentative voice, “this young man is the genuine article and he speaks truth when he says he was taken in by the man pretending to be Murray.”
“I think not, Mr. Cratchit. Observe this line of the birth certificate.” He pointed to the space where the name of the child was listed as Andrew Ebenezer Scrooge.
“See here,” he went on, holding the paper up to the light. It was translucent at just that place where the name had been written in bold India ink, opaque throughout the rest of the document.
“Erasure, Mr. Cratchit. Someone has bleached away the actual name and substituted this one. As India ink, which is carbon-based, does not alter with age, the ink itself is consistent throughout the document. But the worn patch gives the game away. Someone changed this name.”
The young man’s ruddy face paled. “You—you won’t call the authorities on me, will you? It was all Murray’s idea. He stole the papers and said if I played my part well I should have half the swag. I—I’ve never been to India in my life.”
“Of that,” Holmes replied, “I never had the slightest doubt.”
“But why?” I knotted my brow. “Why alter the document? Why not just claim the name already on the birth certificate?”
“An excellent question, Watson. As to that, I have my own ideas. Just a glimmer at present, but I shall soon put the matter to the test.”
As we made our way out of the Army and Navy Club, Holmes stopped at the front desk and requested a telegram to be sent to the India Office. He instructed the bearer to return a response to us in care of the Oriental Club, where we would soon encounter the second claimant to the Scrooge estate.
As we climbed into a cab, I noted the presence of lowering clouds and predicted snow before nightfall. The prospect oddly cheered me, as a reminder of the holiday which was about to begin. Messy muddy streets and damp wool notwithstanding, there is something about snow at Christmas which brings out the child in the hardest of hearts.
“The second young man calling himself Mr. Scrooge,” Cratchit explained, “is accompanied by a Mr. and Mrs. Micawber. You will find them to be—well, sir, perhaps I had better let you find them as you will find them, for you will find them soon enough.”
The famous Wyatt drawing room at the Oriental Club was a welcoming sort of place, very much in the style of the Regency, with high, arched windows and bas-relief acanthus leaves on the ceiling. It was light, airy, and open, all of which might have been delightful on a sunny spring day, but it felt a bit too close to the elements on this squally afternoon. One fireplace tried in vain to give the room sufficient warmth for the few people sitting in overstuffed chairs.
Cratchit limped across the Turkish carpet, making his way to the corner of the room in which sat a tall young man in a blue serge coat and embroidered waistcoat, such as one seldom saw in conservatively dressed London circles. Next to him sat a thin woman of indeterminate age and indeterminate hair color and faded eyes, a woman of whom it must be said that she was a shadow of her former self, even if one had never set eyes upon that former self. No one could have been born so colorless, so apparently devoid of personality.
The man I took to be her husband was as plump and jolly as a Toby jug, bald as an egg with but a fringe of curly hair tickling his neck. His collar was high and his necktie rather fussy in the old style that matched the room itself, for he looked like a Regency dandy who had eaten and drunk far too well in that long-ago hedonistic time and grown old without growing into adulthood.
“Mr. Scrooge, I presume,” Holmes said, repeating his earlier address. The young man rose and proffered his hand in a most frank and friendly manner. Micawber, too, rose and beamed as if he had arranged the meeting for the sole benefit of everyone concerned and thus had the prerogatives of a host. Indeed, he called for best brandy all around, a hospitable gesture that only lost a bit of lustre by his adding, “Put the bottle on Mr. Scrooge’s account, if you please.”
Brandy was poured, sampled, and praised. Cigars were lit and pipes tamped and one or two pleasantries attempted, but the business at hand asserted itself at last and Holmes said, in his blunt way, “I take it you are here to claim your inheritance, Mr. Scrooge? What proof of your bona fides do you present?”
The boy smiled and pointed to a box of Benares metalwork on the table. “I brought this box from Calcutta, Mr. Holmes. Fortunately the thief who stole my birth certificate failed to
acquire this. It contains letters from my great-uncle to my late father. I have not opened it, sir, wishing to preserve the documents in a pristine condition for the Lord Chancellor.”
He reached into his waistcoat pocket and produced a small brass key, which he handed to Holmes with a ceremonial flourish. “I pray you, Mr. Holmes, open the box in the presence of these witnesses and receive the proof of my identity as the son of Fred Scrooge.”
The young man lifted a glass of brandy to his lips as Holmes fitted the delicate key into its lock and turned it. The box opened, and Holmes gently lifted the lid. Inside lay a packet of letters, not unlike the ones Cratchit had shown us at Baker Street, but tied with a black ribbon instead of red.
Holmes withdrew the letters with care. He loosed the ribbon and lay the first envelope on the table, then reached into his pocket for his fingerprint kit. I smiled, having seen him do this magic before; Cratchit’s eyes were round with interest, and the young man began to look decidedly queasy.
Holmes dusted powder on the envelope, blew upon the powder, and then used his tweezers to lift the envelope to the light. The thin Indian paper brought out the prints wonderfully; a film of silver nitrate powder remained, showing the whorls and ridges made by various fingers that had touched the envelope.
Before anyone could react, Holmes swooped down upon the brandy snifter the young man had used. He dusted it for prints as well, examined both snifter and envelope with his magnifying glass, and said, “You lied to me. You said you had not touched these letters, and yet I find your fingerprints upon them. Why, if you are the genuine heir to the Scrooge fortune, would you feel the need to dissemble?”
“I—I didn’t want you to confuse me with the thief who stole my birth certificate,” the young man said. “I thought if you knew I’d handled the letters, you’d condemn me as a fraud.”
The skeptical look in Cratchit’s eye told me this argument was unlikely to sway the Chancery Court upon whom all depended. But Holmes had clearly made up his mind that this second claimant was no more genuine than the first, and the receipt of a telegram from the India Office seemed to confirm some hidden deduction he’d made without telling either Cratchit or me what he was thinking.
More Holmes for the Holidays Page 11