by Graham Moore
“Please, calm yourself. Sherlock Holmes will be fine with or without my help.”
“No,” replied Bram. “He’ll be nothing, Arthur, for heaven’s sake, if you don’t destroy that thing. Do you hear me? For your own good. For my good. And for Holmes’s good.”
“Lord, Bram,” Arthur began, before he was cut off by a noise from upstairs. It sounded like a crash. One of the children had done something improper with a table lamp, and the sound of yelling followed. “Excuse me one moment,” said Arthur as he wandered from his study to see what the matter had been.
By the time he came back, a few minutes later, Bram had the most curious look on his face.
“What is it?” Arthur asked.
“Nothing,” said Bram. “Nothing at all.” He was sweating, Arthur noticed. Bram so rarely perspired.
Neither man had any idea at that moment that in those few short minutes a mystery had been laid. And that after the diary had been hidden, it would take more than a hundred years for it to be found.
CHAPTER 46
The Reichenbach Falls
“Wear flannel next to your skin, and never
believe in eternal punishment.”
—Mary Conan Doyle, to her son Arthur,
as recounted in his memoir Memories and Adventures
January 17, 2010, cont.
When Harold closed the diary, he realized that he was crying. His tears were dripping onto the hard leather cover of the book, mingling with a hundred years of dirt, dust, and a few specks of blood.
He’d read slowly, making sure that Sarah could follow along with him. Now they both sat freezing on the rocks, and they both knew everything. Sarah placed a hand comfortingly on Harold’s knee, and he found himself crying harder. He pulled the diary to his chest and let his tears fall on the dirt. He didn’t have the energy to conceal them. Neither Harold nor Sarah said a word.
After a few minutes, Sarah stood. Without speaking, she gestured along the path through the mountains. She wanted to walk. Harold didn’t object. He brought himself to his feet, feeling aches forming in his thighs and knees. He followed her in the darkness, up the path, higher into the snowy Alps.
He had no idea how long they walked. It could have been twenty minutes or two hours. They walked under the cover of starlight, through the snow, higher and higher. The exertion warmed Harold a little, and after some time he thought he was close to regaining feeling in his fingertips. Sarah sensed his cold, and despite her own she removed her coat and wrapped it around his shoulders. He didn’t thank her but only walked farther, higher and higher through the thinning air.
He wasn’t sure where they were going, and he didn’t care. He began to appreciate the cold in his bones, the cold freezing the tears on his face. The chill quieted his racing thoughts. He could only feel so much in his head, in his frayed and slow-beating heart, when the rest of his body was frozen. The thought occurred to him that if he lived here, if he set up camp in the mountains and never came down, he might be able to avoid all future feeling altogether. The plan sounded as reasonable as any other.
Before they came upon the clearing, Harold heard the sound of rushing water. Because of the darkness, they didn’t see the waterfall until they were only a few feet away from it. Harold felt the mist from the racing falls spray his face at the same time that he saw the cascading torrent of water through the trees. He could hear the water crashing against the rocks below, slapping against the hard side of the mountain every hundred yards until, somewhere far in the dark distance, the water landed in a churning pool and fed into a lake deep in the valley.
The Reichenbach Falls. They both stopped walking and stared silently off into the distance at what little of the falls they could see.
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said.
“Me, too.” Harold didn’t have an ounce of anger left inside him. He wasn’t sure how much of anything he had left inside him anymore.
“Are you happy?” she asked. “Are you glad you found the diary?”
Harold did not need to think in order to answer truthfully.
“No.”
Sarah reached across his body and took the diary from his hand. He loosened his fingers and gave it to her without argument or complaint. She stepped back from the ledge. She pulled the diary behind her, curling her arm like a pitcher, and overhand she threw the diary as far as she could into the darkness. They could almost hear the diary collide with the falls, as it was rocketed downward toward the cragged lake by the force of the water.
And then silence. Stillness. The hum of the waterfall and two sets of breaths, puffing in unison.
“Thank you,” Harold said.
Sarah reached for his hand and held it warmly in her own. There, staring into the night sky, they stayed, fingers intertwined. Harold squeezed as hard as he could, and Sarah squeezed back, each gripping the other’s hand until they felt their fragile bones were about to shatter.
CHAPTER 47
Farewell
And so, reader, farewell to Sherlock Holmes! I thank you for
your past constancy, and can but hope that some return has
been made in the shape of that distraction from the worries
of life and stimulating change of thought which can only
be found in the fairy kingdom of romance.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
preface to The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes
August 11,1901
The workmen were tired. They had been at it all day, sweating through the August heat and dampening the armpits of their navy blue uniforms. Two days ago they had finished laying the twenty-foot-long main electrical cables from the Marylebone Station to Baker Street. The mains were thick and quite heavy, two copper tubes placed one inside the other and layered with brown wax. The whole thing was encased in heavy iron, and every time the men lifted a long section of cable between them, they’d grunt and feel the strain in their bulging necks. Yesterday a larger team had come to help raise the cables above the houses, laying them between the lampposts and over the two-story roofs. It had taken twelve men to spread their web of wires outward through Marylebone, slowly west to Paddington. Today only two workmen were left to remove the gas lamps atop each pole along Baker Street and replace them with electric bulbs. Late in the afternoon, as the sun melted into the taller buildings along Montague Square, the two sweaty, exhausted men took turns mounting their one ladder and unscrewing the tops of the gas lamps. One would stand on the ladder’s lowest rung, weighting it down, while the other would climb to the top. The poles had been connected to the nascent grid already, so all that remained was to connect the sockets to the positive and negative lines and then replace the bulbs. The wires kept slipping through their damp fingers, and when they would try to brush the sweat off on their work suits, they would leave finger-shaped stains of wax and dirt on the navy cloth. They were getting very tired.
Just after sunset, a few hours behind schedule, they came to the final lamppost, right before the corner of Igor Street and the park. The shorter of the two held the ladder from below, because it was his turn to do so, and the taller man ascended the eight vertical steps to the bulb. It took him only a few minutes to rewire the fixture, and by the time he came back down the ladder, every lamp along Baker Street had been wired for electricity.
After returning the ladder and tools to the back of their wide-bedded carriage, they walked to the Marylebone Station to complete the connection. Once they had connected the Baker Street line to the system, from the transformer room deep underneath the station, they made their way back to examine their work.
They turned the corner as ten thousand volts surged from the Deptford Power Station, nine miles away, through the Ferranti cables underneath the city and onto the shining expanse of Baker Street. It was a brilliant sight, and though they had worked for the London Electric Supply Company for a few years now, the first glance at a street illuminated solely by the searing electric bulbs still caused a brief shock. Every buil
ding, every alleyway, every dark and fetid cobblestone had been washed clean in the radiant light.
“Oi,” said the taller workman. “That’s it, then.”
“I’d say so,” replied the other.
“Lord, but it’s sure bright, isn’t it? I can’t hardly see the fog anymore.”
His partner simply nodded in agreement. It was as if a layer of gloom and dread had been stripped from the streets, leaving the city white and clear. But the vision of this white and sparkling street was odd, too, and neither man possessed the words to explain why. So much that had been hidden was revealed in the electric light, so much had been gained. But perhaps something had been lost as well. Perhaps, both men thought but did not say, a part of them would miss the romantic flickering of the gaslight.
The first workman fished around in the pocket of his coat.
“You have any coin on you?” he said.
His friend patted his own pockets and heard a comforting jingle of metal.
“A few pence, I’d say. Why?”
The first man gestured toward the park.
“There’s a boy ’round the corner selling the papers. I’ve got a couple bits on me as well. You feel like a story?”
The second man thought about it, and smiled.
“Yes, I dare say I do. Something you have in mind?”
“There’s that new Strand out this morning. ‘The Hound of the Something-or-Another.’ A new Holmes one.”
“Oh! Yes, I think I could go for a good one of those.”
As they walked, both men removed all the coins they could find from their pockets. They presented the meager change to each other sheepishly. It wasn’t much, they knew. But based on a quick count, they found they had exactly enough for two pints of bitter ale and one paperback mystery.
Author’s Note
Romance writers are a class of people who very
much dislike being hampered by facts.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
from an address given in honor of
Robert Peary, May 1910
So, then, what really happened?
Not to disappoint you, but the only honest answer I can give is this one: It’s a bit of a mystery.
While The Sherlockian is a work of historical fiction, the emphasis needs to be placed on the word “fiction.” Many of the events described here did not happen, and many of the characters rendered did not exist. But since a number of them did exist, and since the work in front of you is a collage of the verifiably real, the probably real, the possibly real, and the demonstrably false, I thought a few words of explanation might be in order.
So here goes. The following is all true:
After Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, a collection of his papers went missing from among his effects. This collection—some letters, some half-finished stories, and a volume of Conan Doyle’s diary— remained mysteriously vanished for over seventy years and was the holy grail of Sherlockian studies for most of the twentieth century. Generations of scholars attempted to locate it, but none met with any success.
Finally, in 2004, Richard Lancelyn Green, the world’s foremost scholar of Sherlock Holmes, announced that he’d found Conan Doyle’s lost papers. However, Green claimed that a distant relative of Conan Doyle’s had stolen these papers from Conan Doyle’s daughter and was planning to sell them at auction rather than donate the documents to charity as Green—and Conan Doyle’s immediate heirs—had wished. A dispute emerged between Green and this relative, and their argument over the rightful ownership of the papers grew increasingly bitter, and increasingly public. By March of 2004, Green had begun to tell his friends that he was worried for his own safety. He claimed that he received threatening messages and that he was being followed by a shadowy American. He told one close friend that his home was bugged, and he demanded that some visitors speak with him only in his garden. Green’s friends in the Sherlockian community became concerned.
On March 27, Richard Lancelyn Green was found dead in his South Kensington flat. He had been strangled—garroted—with one of his own shoelaces. His sister, Priscilla, discovered the body. The coroner returned an open verdict, and as of this writing the case is still considered unsolved by the London police.
Immediately thereafter Sherlockians around the globe began to search for Green’s killer. Grand theories quickly emerged, as some Sherlockians believed that the feud within the Conan Doyle family over the author’s estate had grown violent and taken Green’s life, while others thought it more likely that Green had committed suicide in order to cast suspicion on another party. The character of Harold, in this novel, is a composite of a number of real-life Sherlockians—all of whom, I can assure you, outshine Harold in both brilliance and social grace.
For more information about the death of Richard Lancelyn Green, I highly recommend the article “Mysterious Circumstances” by David Grann (New Yorker, December 13, 2004). Or, for a shorter introduction, try “The Curious Incident of the Boxes” by Sarah Lyall (New York Times, May 19, 2004).
All the information in the novel about modern Sherlockian societies— the Baker Street Irregulars and their many scion groups—is accurate, to the best of my knowledge, as are the descriptions of their meetings and rituals. That said, meetings of the Irregulars are not open to the public, and so I have relied upon public reports and interviews for a glimpse into their secret world. A very special thanks to Leslie Klinger— world-class Sherlockian and editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes—for his help on these points and many others. And thanks also to Chris Redmond—creator of Sherlockian.net, which is an invaluable Sherlockian resource entirely unaffiliated with this book—for teaching me the long and not particularly sordid history of the Irregulars. As both of these men have forgotten more about Sherlockian studies than I will ever know, please note that all errors in this work are entirely my own.
As for the turn-of-the-century story line, all of the biographical information about Arthur Conan Doyle contained here is true. Many wonderful biographies of Conan Doyle exist, though I recommend Daniel Stashower’s Teller of Tales in particular. Stashower also edited Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, a masterfully compiled collection of Conan Doyle’s personal correspondence. Additionally, Julian Barnes’s novel Arthur & George presents a beautifully rendered—and accurate!—portrait of Conan Doyle working on one of the real-life crimes he investigated. Over the years Conan Doyle assisted Scotland Yard on a number of cases; The Real World of Sherlock Holmes, by Peter Costello, contains a terrific list of all of the crimes with which Conan Doyle became involved. The particular case he investigates in The Sherlockian is fictional, though it is a composite of a number of nonfictional ones, especially the infamous “Brides in the Bath” murders of the period, a mystery that Conan Doyle himself did help to unravel.
One major fictional leap has been taken in the Arthur Conan Doyle story line, however: A group of angry suffragists did not place a letter bomb in Conan Doyle’s mail in 1900. They did so in 1911. The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign: 1866—1928, by Harold L. Smith, has been a fantastic resource on the subject of the NUWSS and its leader, Millicent Fawcett.
The portrayal of Bram Stoker in this novel is also as accurate as possible and is based chiefly on Bram Stoker and the Man Who Was Dracula, a brilliant biography written by Barbara Belford. Though Oscar Wilde is not quite a character in The Sherlockian, his presence looms large over both Conan Doyle and Stoker. Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ellmann, remains the final word on Wilde biographies, as it has been for over twenty years.
All locations featured in this novel are real. If you can manage it, I highly recommend a trip to Switzerland to see the Sherlock Holmes Museum. Take a stroll between the chairs, lamps, and gasogenes from Arthur Conan Doyle’s old study. Who knows what you’ll find there?
GPM
2010
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks—
To the great friends who read early drafts of this work and whose e
ditorial insights are worth far more to me than any lost diary: Alice Boone, Kate Cronin-Furman, Amanda Taub, Rebecca White, Janet Silver, Richard Siegler, Helen Estabrook, Leslie Klinger, Sara McPherson, and Johnathan McClain.
To the professionals—the very best in the business—who through their creativity and acumen turned this book into something far grander than I could ever have imagined: Jennifer Joel, Niki Castle, Jonathan Karp, Colin Shepherd, Cary Goldstein, Maureen Sugden, Dorothea Halliday, Tom Drumm, Vanessa Joyce, and Max Grossman.
To the loved ones who made sure that I kept writing when I was awfully convinced that I would stop: Lily Binns, Ann Schuster, Avinash Karnani, Matt Wallaert, Tony O’Rourke, Christine Varnado, and the Plaid Shadow.
To my family. All of you.
And an extra special thank-you to Ben Epstein, who is the best writer I know and the reason I started writing fiction in the first place.
About the Author
GRAHAM MOORE is a twenty-eight-year-old graduate of Columbia University, with a degree in religious history. He lives in Los Angeles.
Table of Contents
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13