Holmes Entangled

by Gordon McAlpine

  To my wonderment, I awoke elsewhere.

  I noticed the purple light of morning through my hotel room window.

  I was lying on the bedspread, fully dressed, beside Mrs. Watson. I had no recollection of moving from the chair to the bed. Surely, she had not awakened and carried me. So, I must have switched off the light and stumbled there half-asleep. My first thought was to get up. But then I noticed that Mrs. Watson, who lay on her side facing me, had opened her eyes.

  “You can stay as you are,” she said.

  The slur was gone from her speech, and I knew she was no longer impaired.

  So I relaxed back into my pillow.

  “The sun’s not even up yet, Sherlock. So let’s sleep a little longer, all right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She closed her eyes.

  I closed mine, too, and in no time drifted back to sleep.

  It was after eight when Mrs. Watson’s sitting up on the bed awoke me.

  I turned to her, hoping she’d not be offended by our impropriety.

  I needn’t have worried.

  She smiled as she set the blanket aside and stood up, stretching her neck and shoulders. “I have to get back to my room to put myself together,” she said. “I’m sure you have a very active day planned for us. Did you finish reading the manuscript?”

  I nodded.

  “You can tell me about it downstairs at breakfast.”

  “Yes.”

  She picked up her purse and searched out her room key. She turned back to me. “Good morning, Sherlock.”

  “Good morning, my dear.”

  She tapped the end of the bed twice with her fingertips, a punctuation of sorts, and then left my room.

  I fell back onto my side of the bed, looking up at the ceiling. There was much to do today, though what I’d read in Baudelaire’s account made me uncertain as to the next move. Perhaps reviewing the account with Mrs. Watson would stir an analytical breakthrough, I hoped.

  And then, briefly, I stopped thinking about the case altogether.

  At seventy-three years old, I had never before spent an entire night in bed with another person.

  How strange and wonderful that it had been John’s widow.

  Downstairs in the hotel’s tiny breakfast room, Mrs. Watson and I shared tea and pastries as I related to her the substance of Baudelaire’s report.

  “The note left in Poe’s disheveled room revealed the assailants’ demands,” I said. “They objected to assertions in the author’s recently published essay, ‘Eureka,’ and warned him against referring to particular sections of the work in the lecture tour he was scheduled to undertake.”

  “And the part of the essay to which they objected?”

  “You can likely guess, Mrs. Watson.”

  “The part about multiple worlds,” she surmised, accurately.

  I quoted from Poe’s essay: “‘ . . . a limitless succession of Universes, more or less similar to that of which we have cognizance.’”

  “What happened then?”

  “Dupin undertook an exhaustive investigation, beginning with a visit to the New York offices of the essay’s beleaguered publisher, and, after a series of bold maneuvers, concluding with a consultation in the crypt beneath St. John the Evangelist Church in Manhattan, Dupin uncovered a conspiracy involving a powerful cabal opposed to any public promotion of what Baudelaire labels univers parallèles.”

  “And this cabal was the Eureka Society?” she asked.

  I nodded. “In Baudelaire’s account, the assassination plot is referred to as the ‘Eureka Project,’ though I suspect the conspirators currently threating Conan Doyle are ideologically descended from this earlier incarnation, with significant variations to account for our modern era.”

  “Why couldn’t Poe just cancel his lecture tour, if his life was threatened?” she asked.

  “First, to do so would be against Poe’s nature. The manuscript makes clear that the American was prideful to the point of self-destruction. But that’s not all. There is a perverse, ironic turn as well. When the conspirators learned that Poe had secured the aid of the famous C. Auguste Dupin, whose ratiocination they respected, they adjudged that merely warning Poe was insufficient, concluding that the author, now aided by a personage of such renown, posed a greater risk than before and, consequently, had to be killed.”

  “So what did Dupin do?”

  “He and Baudelaire raced back to Baltimore, finding Poe in his rooms. There, they explained to the troubled author that he’d been marked for death and that his only hope was to ‘disappear.’ However, a glance out the third story window indicated that even at that moment, just outside the flat, there hovered a pair of burly men who’d likely been employed to kill Poe. Dupin remained unfazed, entreating Baudelaire and his client to switch clothing. As Baudelaire was slightly larger than Poe, the American looked bedraggled in the new clothes, which, nonetheless, and more importantly, were quite different from the American author’s signature black attire. The young Baudelaire’s clothing was flamboyant and colorful and, thereby, potentially deceptive. His hat was particularly unique, being the sort only a French poet, or perhaps a musketeer, would dare to wear. ‘Leave your documents of identification hidden here under the mattress and go straight to the train station, Mr. Poe,’ Dupin beseeched. Poe agreed, expressing his gratitude.”

  I took a sip of tea.

  “And?” Mrs. Watson pressed.

  “Dupin and Baudelaire watched from the darkened window as Poe, in the big hat and ill-fitting clothing, exited the building, crossed the street, and safely maneuvered past the assassins. Indeed, a few minutes later, the two killers burst into Poe’s room with clubs raised, only to find Dupin and Baudelaire sipping brandy and sharing passages from the Bible. Confused, the henchmen went away.”

  “So Poe disappeared?” Mrs. Watson asked. She didn’t wait for an answer. “I thought he died under ‘mysterious circumstances.’”

  “Indeed, Baudelaire’s chronicle lacks a felicitous ending,” I answered. “Poe did not go straight to the train station, as instructed. Instead, he stopped at a public house for a ‘constitutional.’ Then another and another. There, apparently, the assassins discovered him, as the next morning he was found unconscious, brutally beaten while in ‘someone else’s clothing,’ thereby creating a mystery about which newspapers speculated until Poe died in hospital a few days later, having never regained consciousness. In cruel obituaries, he was discredited as a crank, and his final essay ‘Eureka’ was ridiculed and soon forgotten. And there you have it.”

  “So, Dupin and Baudelaire returned to France?”

  “Post haste,” I said. “Aiding Poe, they too had crossed the conspirators. Indeed, Baudelaire admits at the end of his manuscript that he’d like to publish it, counting the adventure among his favorites, were it not that to do so would bring down the wrath of the cabal.”

  “Who is this cabal, Sherlock? Did the manuscript say? Is it the Church?”

  I picked up my tea cup. “How do you reason that, Mrs. Watson?”

  She shrugged. “Well, as you mentioned, the Church has long objected to any concept of univers parallèles. And why wouldn’t they? After all, where would God fit into a multitude of universes?”

  “That’s an astute observation,” I said.

  “Thank you, Sherlock.”

  I considered my many years in Baker Street and the countless times I’d noted minute details of visiting strangers without ever truly having observed Mrs. Hudson. Now, I realized she might have assisted John and me on numerous investigations. But I’d failed to observe, the trait for which I am most celebrated. And failing to recruit her for assistance in our cases may have been the least of it. How many simple, companionable moments had I missed with her in those years? “Go on, Mrs. Watson. Your analysis is astute.”

  She hardly needed encouragement. “Well, if there existed countless versions of all of us, wouldn’t we each be every manner of sinner, saint, and everything in bet
ween? In one universe or another, I mean. And, if that were so, then God’s judgment of our souls would be impossible. Heaven and hell? All of it, threatened. And with that, the ultimate power of the Church.”

  “That’s sound reasoning,” I said. “A bit medieval, but sound.”

  She picked up her orange juice. “I’m glad it’s sound, but is it correct?”

  I nodded. “Church interests were indeed central to the Eureka Project in 1849. However, while the Church may still be peripherally involved, they cannot be the primary movers behind today’s Eureka Society.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the Church no longer possesses the power to do so, however many inane conspiracy theories might be found daily in the News of the World. No, the Church has been humbled since the days of our unfortunate Mr. Poe.”

  “Humbled by what?”

  I put down my tea. “By science, which insists on empirical evidence.”

  “Science existed in Poe’s day,” she observed.

  “Yes, but not in the manner of today. Oh, 1849 was not 1549. Poe was not burned at the stake. But, remember, in the mid-nineteenth century Pius IX still exerted real power. As the last pope to reign over the Papal States, he decreed his own infallibility and struck hard against modernity. Since Poe’s death, however, we’ve had Darwin, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, and the others. As a result, the Church no longer wields the power it did in Poe’s day.”

  “So who wields such power?”

  “Governments, international business, banks, organized crime, and various underground combinations thereof.” Again, I thought fruitlessly of Moriarty.

  “Then which among them . . . ?” she started.

  “None, as matters currently stand,” I interrupted.

  Her face registered her surprise. “None? Why not?”

  “The same answer,” I said. “Science.”

  She shook her head, confused.

  “As I said, ours is an age of empirical evidence. Mere irreligious, philosophical propositions, such as Poe’s ‘Eureka’ or Conan Doyle’s recent essay, no longer pose the same threats they once did to the powers that be.”

  “Yet Conan Doyle was shot.”

  “Indeed.”

  “So where does that leave us? I don’t understand.”

  Nor did I.

  After all, no entity powerful enough to accomplish the actions of the past weeks, beginning with the assassination attempt on Conan Doyle and continuing through the seemingly unnoticed dismantling of the Society for Psychic Research and the compromise of both police reports and newspaper coverage regarding my shooting of the blond assassin, would feel threatened by the mere anecdotal writings of Conan Doyle, a man whose greatest notoriety came as a scribbler of historical romances and speculative fiction. Our living prime minister’s spectral, alternative appearance? Absurd. Yet the murderous intent with which the current incarnation of the Eureka Society had responded to news of such an appearance belied the absurdity. Multiple worlds? Nonsensical! It may be true, as Hamlet said to Horatio, that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. But of what use today is such a vague recognition of the Unknowable absent hard evidence? What possible threat to true power can any such unsupportable concept pose?

  Thus, my thoughts spiraled.

  Mrs. Watson took a deep breath, sorting it through. “So, today’s Church lacks the power, while the institutions that possess such power lack the motivation. Is that how you see it, Sherlock?”

  “Something close to that,” I acknowledged. A conundrum. Or perhaps just a dead end.

  “So what are we to do next?”

  I hadn’t a good answer to Mrs. Watson’s question. Nor to the essential question she hadn’t asked: what was the source behind Conan Doyle’s identifying me in Cambridge in the first place? Absent answers, I dissembled. “This is not the most private place to discuss such matters,” I observed, glancing around the deserted breakfast room.

  She turned toward the kitchen. “Oh, I don’t think Madame even speaks English,” she countered.

  “You don’t think she does?” I said. “Meaning you’re not certain.”

  “Ah,” she answered, catching my conspiratorial tone. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Yes, we’ll talk later.”

  I looked at my watch. “Let’s finish breakfast, Mrs. Watson. We’ll stop at Le Rossignol to return the manuscript and then make our way onto to the next ferry train for London.”

  “And then?” she queried.

  I merely smiled.

  After a moment, she nodded slyly, as if my confident expression was all the answer she needed.

  Of course, I’d offered her no real answer to her question.

  What was my plan?

  At that moment, I planned simply to return to London, assume a new disguise, and divide my time surveilling the offices of the counterfeit Society for Psychic Research and the regular residence of Conan Doyle. Unobtrusive observation. Nothing brilliant. Ordinary detective work. In other words, starting over. But I never put that modest agenda into effect. Rather, upon our return to my Bloomsbury safe house late that same night, we would discover circumstances altered such that no further surveillance was required. Matters of immediate urgency would impel our attentions. Of course, as Mrs. Watson and I stood from the table in the breakfast room of the Hotel de la Sorbonne, I did not yet know what dramatic turns awaited us.

  “One last question before we leave,” she said, setting her napkin down beside the empty basket of pastries.

  “Yes?”

  She pointed to my plate. “Are you going to finish that croissant, Sherlock?”

  “No, my dear. Please, take it.”

  In some other world did I answer differently?

  CHAPTER NINE

  “So you’re saying that now you believe in séances?” Conan Doyle asked me late that night, shortly after Mrs. Watson and I arrived in Bloomsbury, both of us weary from the day’s travel and perhaps slightly unprepared for the scribbler’s spirited response to the brief summation I’d offered him of the investigation’s previous seventy-two hours.

  “If you mean by séances a systematic manner of contact between this world and a ‘world of the dead,’ conducted by a professional medium, then no,” I answered, seated at one end of the sofa in the front parlor, “I don’t believe in séances.”

  Mrs. Watson sat at the other end of the sofa, quietly taking it in.

  Coming from the train station, I’d offered to drop her at her house on Belgrave Square. But as she already carried her overnight bag, with her cosmetics and a second change of clothes, she had opted to join me here. This house had plenty of bedrooms. I suspect she wanted to participate in Conan Doyle’s debriefing, as the case had captured her imagination.

  Meanwhile, Conan Doyle paced the room before us. Though it was almost midnight, he showed no fatigue, exhibiting a physical vigor enviable for any man of his age. Doubtless, his enforced, solitary confinement, regardless of the residence’s comfortable furnishings and well-stocked kitchen, had served to intensify not only his restlessness but also his natural gregariousness.

  “But didn’t you just say you thought the manifestation of this spirit version of Prime Minister Baldwin, or, rather, the non-Prime Minister Baldwin, might indeed have been real?” he pressed me, gesturing with his arms like a barrister attempting to make a point before the bench.

  I sighed, but then reminded myself that Conan Doyle’s questions were not unreasonable or insignificant, particularly as it was he who’d been shot. “What I actually just said, Sir Arthur, was that I did not believe Madame Du Lac created a fraudulent ‘spirit’ in the home of Lady Vale Owen.”

  “But if the spirit was not ‘fraudulent,’ then it must have been real,” he responded.

  “I did not say it was ‘not fraudulent.’” The last thing I wanted was a semantic confrontation. But it seemed I had no choice. “I said only that Madame Du Lac did not create the illusion.”

 
“Then who did?” he demanded. “And how?”

  For this, I had no answers.

  “And what of the univers parallèles that Poe wrote about?” he continued.

  “It is scientifically unsupported, my dear Conan Doyle.”

  “Yes, but not so long ago the same could have been said of the wireless.”

  “The wireless is a technological development,” I replied.

  “True,” he countered, “but the theory behind its development, invisible electromagnetic waves, would have seemed pure balderdash as recently as our own youths, Mr. Holmes!”

  I shrugged in acknowledgement, somewhat surprised that Conan Doyle understood something as modern as the workings of a wireless. Nonetheless, I found his display of credulity unappealing. So I offered what I hoped would be sufficient to conclude the conversation.

  “Despite my unwavering rejection of Spiritualism,” I said, “I am willing to acknowledge that I cannot as yet offer any conventional explanation for the manifestation you witnessed.”

  Conan Doyle made a fist, as if he had just scored the winning penalty kick in a football game. “Then you agree that all is possible.”

  “That’s not what I said,” I murmured, too weary to further argue the point.

  He seemed not to have heard me. “The thesis of my latest essay, which I wrote yesterday at that desk,” he said, pointing, “is that contact with invisible worlds is indeed possible.”

  “Fine,” I answered dismissively, glad for whatever distraction writing an essay had provided him. It is not easy to be a house prisoner, particularly for a man as energetic as Conan Doyle.

  “It would be a pleasure to read your new essay, Sir Arthur,” Mrs. Watson said.

  “I’d be most happy for your opinion, Mrs. Watson,” he answered. “But I’m afraid I sent off the essay by this morning’s post.”

  I turned, suddenly wide awake. “You did what?”

  He shrugged. “Oh, I know some authors take more time with their work. But I did not earn my literary reputation for being ‘prolific’ by overthinking, overediting, or overwriting. I know what I want to write and I write it. Simple as that. I leave slaving over a manuscript to your neighbors here in Bloomsbury who take years to complete their novels. I wouldn’t be interested in making their acquaintance even if I were free to walk out that door. They might be a bad influence on my work.”