Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly

by Donald Thomas

  There was absolute silence among the jurors, and for a dreadful moment I thought they might applaud him. Mr Mossop sat down. In a few sentences, Sherlock Holmes had backed him into a corner and tied him into knots. The greatest criminal investigator of the age had announced to the world the innocence of the young woman whose liberty was at stake.

  Dr Allestree rubbed salt into Mr Mossop’s wounds by reminding us that the sole issue was the death of James Mordaunt and the conduct of Alfred Swain, who had undoubtedly precipitated it. I hoped for “misadventure” or even “justifiable homicide.” Guided by the coroner and puzzled by the medical evidence, the jurors returned an open verdict.

  I stood up and turned round. At the back of the court were two figures, sitting decorously apart. Maria Jessel wore a black veil of mourning. I could not imagine what had brought her to Bly. Despite Inspector Gregson’s memorandum, the Treasury Solicitor recommended no action against her. Peter Quint had died in the County of Essex, and Alfred Swain had argued against a prosecution. As for the boat, how a bung came loose was a matter of pure conjecture, and no evidence could be found to connect her with this. The one item that now appeared to prove her innocence beyond question was a message from her on the night of Mordaunt’s death loyally warning her lover of the danger he was in.

  The second figure behind me wore no veil. It is always within the Home Secretary’s discretion to release a prisoner from Broadmoor—and that discretion had been exercised several days before. Proceedings to set aside the verdict of “not guilty by reason of insanity” on Victoria Temple were more complex and might be argued delicately throughout the summer term by the Lords Justices of Appeal. There was no doubt of the outcome.

  Holmes and I congratulated our client. We listened encouragingly to her plans for buying a small house on the Devonshire coast, near Lynmouth, and joining a friend who ran a little school there. We congratulated Alfred Swain, whose integrity and marksmanship had carried the day.

  Holmes was in demand for a further half-hour. He congratulated Superintendent Truscott on resisting a prosecution of Maria Jessel. In truth, Truscott had been all for it but was outmanoeuvred by Swain. Holmes, in his most affable manner, also suggested that reputations would suffer if the debacle of Victoria Temple’s case were to be followed by another. He intimated that Edward Marshall Hall and Rufus Isaacs had already offered their services to the young woman without fee. Isaacs was a demon in cross-examination with no great respect for the constabulary. Miss Jessel was troubled no further.

  I took a final circuit of the lake. Summer warmed the immaculate lawns, the cedar canopies and alleys running to the water. The lake was full, its yellow pads of lilies stretching to rhododendrons in purple view. The sounds and the sense of habitation died away. I stared again across the Middle Deep to the shore where Miss Temple had seen Miss Jessel.

  It was perhaps fifteen minutes’ walk back to the house. As on that previous occasion, there was an unaccountable stillness. As I listened, I heard not a sound of a bird—nor a sheep. I had surely been walking back for much longer than fifteen minutes. It was almost a relief, as I passed opposite the clearing of the apparitions, to hear the call of a bird and see the lake move. That call came again, but not quite at the same pitch or of the same duration. Of course it was an animal, not a bird.

  It seemed best to step out and be going, but that curious call rang again. It was surely a cat’s cry. But it could not be. No cats could get to the island. How would they live there? It was damned nonsense—but it was a cat if it was anything. Then I thought of the mewling of the children as they stalked Victoria Temple. Damned nonsense, to be sure. If there were no cats on the island there were certainly no children! But in the warm summer gardens the air was cold. That was the breeze on the lake, no doubt.

  A cat’s wail may be long and even undulating, but it does not break, as this one did, into a sob. This was distant, treble, plaintive, the hiccupping rhythm of a human motor that will not start. Very well, then there must be a children’s picnic on the island. It was entirely probable on a summer day and a preferable explanation to any other.

  There was no boat, but even so … The sobbing rose louder and fell again. It broke as infant tears, then into a laugh. It was someone playing a joke! Who? And how? Another laugh, chuckling, derisive. In that case, reason required that children were playing a trick as Miles and Flora had played one with Miss Temple. That was all. But Miles and Flora had been alive—and now they were certainly dead.

  All I had to do was to walk steadily along the remainder of the lakeside path. There was nothing to impede me, and every step brought me closer to the company of Holmes and the others. But to welcome safety in this way was to give in to the thing again. As I walked, the sobbing or chuckling, which had fallen behind, now seemed to keep pace. I hope I am no coward in such matters. Twice I swung round—and saw only motionless water-lilies and the high white clouds still as a stage-set against the blue summer sky.

  The lawn was in front of me now and the gate to the courtyard. The Tudor garden tower with its ruined staircase rose warm and still at my side. This was where the whole thing had started and it proved to be no more than an easy cheat by James Mordaunt. No apparition could linger here now. I paused and listened. The calls and cries, whatever they were, had gone. How could they be more than country children sounding closer than they were—the effect of the wind carrying sound through branches and over quiet water? But now there was no wind, it was still again. The birds and the sheep were silent once more, for all the world as if they were listening to the silence.

  I was level with the brick tower and I kept a dignified pace as I passed towards the courtyard gate. I was not to be hurried. I could look where I liked and hold my own. But I did not feel the need to look up at those battlements. Whether it was because I disdained to do so or because I preferred not to, I must leave to the reader to judge.

  3

  Sherlock Holmes

  the Actor

  A FRAGMENT OF BIOGRAPHY

  Anumber of my readers will be familiar with the fragments of biography which I have recalled in illustrating the cases of my friend Mr Sherlock Holmes. As we enter the world of the London theatre—“gaslight and greasepaint,” as he used to call it—I must say something of his youthful stage career. It was very brief, beginning in 1879 and ending in the early spring of 1881, shortly before we first met.

  I only once saw the tall, spare figure of Sherlock Holmes upon a stage. The audience had left the auditorium of the Royal Herculaneum more than an hour before. The curtains had been drawn open again to reveal the set. The lights had gone up and, by the battlements of Prince Hamlet’s Elsinore, stood Holmes, tall, hawk-like and angular. In the white tie and tails of his evening clothes, he was in conversation with the stage manager, Mr Roland Gwyn. Beyond earshot were two stage-hands, one or two actors with minor parts, and two officers from the Metropolitan Police. Inspector Hopkins of Scotland Yard was in plain clothes. Superintendent Bradstreet of the nearby Bow Street police station wore the frogged jacket of the uniformed branch. A few yards away, one of the greatest actors in England—in the world, indeed—lay dead in his dressing-room.

  Let us leave that great tragedian lying there a moment longer, while I explain our involvement in what I have called “The Case of the Matinee Idol.”

  If ever a man was a born actor, it was Sherlock Holmes. Early in our friendship, he employed masterly disguises as a cabman and as an elderly nonconformist clergyman, in our case of “A Scandal in Bohemia.” I remarked to him at the time that the stage had lost a great actor when he turned his back upon it in order to become a specialist in crime. To my surprise, he took the comment seriously and at once began to compare himself favourably with the great performers of the day. Holmes never suffered from false modesty. He thought he would have encountered little competition on the London stage—except perhaps from Irving and possibly from Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. But that was all.

  This will sound absurdl
y boastful to those who know little of his life before our meeting in 1881. Indeed, few of his clients or acquaintances at Scotland Yard, let alone his enemies, ever had any idea that he once lived and worked in the company of such theatrical giants as Sir Henry Caradoc Price or popular character actors like “Captain” Carnaby Jenks. On half-a-dozen occasions, as an understudy, he even played opposite the great Sir Henry Irving himself.

  My companion’s longest theatrical acquaintance was with “Caradoc,” as the mercurial Welshman was universally known. By 1890, Caradoc Price’s Royal Herculaneum Theatre in the Strand was a by-word for the boldest and the best. In his own estimation, at least, this flamboyant actor-manager was the greatest Shakespearean of his day.

  A few weeks ago, having decided to give this story to the world, I made my way once again up the steep stairs of the Baker Street attic. Among dust and cobwebs in that lumber room stand such souvenirs as the fine silhouette profile of the Great Detective, designed and fashioned by the renowned theatrical artist of Grenoble, Monsieur Oscar Meunier. When it was set against the curtain of our sitting-room after dark, those looking up from the street were convinced that it moved as the angle of the light changed. It was first used to bring to justice the notorious Colonel Sebastian Moran, and several times persuaded Holmes’s enemies that he was at home when in truth he was many miles away.

  At the far end of the loft was the cumbersome tin trunk, which had belonged to my friend since he left home in his teens. Its hinge moved a little stiffly and the black lacquer was somewhat chipped. Yet the documents and legal parchments it contained were as crisp and alluring as ever. Each represented some tour de force of his analytical reasoning.

  Here and there I noticed packets of letters, tied with tape and pencilled “Miss Ethel Le Neve in re H. H. Crippen for murder,” or “Society for Insuring against Losses on the Turf,” or “The City of Paris Loan Frauds.” Elsewhere, barristers’ briefs, black-letter legal parchments, had been marked by Holmes’s scribble. He had written on Rex v. Dougal, “The Case of the Naked Bicyclists,” and on Regina v. Temple, “The Bly House Murder.” The notorious Siege of Sidney Street by Russian anarchists, which brought gunfire and insurrection to the London streets, was annotated rather whimsically as “The Mystery of the Yellow Canary.” News of a missing canary was indeed the first clue to the conspiracy.

  Holmes had been too busy until the last day of his life to find time for putting such a mass of papers into order. Fortunately, I knew what I was after and soon came to a stiff white envelope, about eight inches by ten. From this I shook out several theatrical programmes. The first was for McVicker’s Theater, Madison Street, Chicago. This ornamental structure had been rebuilt after the great fire of 1871 in that city. The cover of its programme for November 1880 announced “The Sassanoff Shakespeare Touring Company of London.” The drama to be played was Romeo and Juliet. Romeo was performed by Henry Caradoc Price and Juliet by Anna Weld. Among the supporting cast, the character of Mercutio was acted by “William Sherlock Scott Holmes.” At the Broad Street Theatre, Philadelphia, the programme for the Sassanoff company advertised Othello. The hero was once again personified by Caradoc Price and Desdemona by Miss Weld. The part of the hapless dupe Roderigo was taken by a young supernumerary, Carnaby Jenks, and the villainous Iago by “W. S. Holmes.”

  These four actors played turn and turn about in Macbeth and Twelfth Night at the Lafayette Opera House in Washington, and The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet at the Garden Theatre in New York. From time to time they performed in front of university audiences at Princeton and Yale. Henry Caradoc Price invariably took the leading role, but “W. S. Holmes” seemed content to be Macbeth’s porter or Shylock’s servant, Hamlet’s Horatio or any of Falstaff’s unsavoury cronies.

  I once asked Holmes why he had abandoned his career as a consulting detective and turned his back on forensic chemistry for a year. Was it merely to set off on this theatrical jaunt to America—as it seemed I must call it? He looked at me as if I should have known that he had not abandoned anything. It was imperative for an ambitious young “consulting detective” to add a thorough knowledge of acting and disguise to his other talents. In the end, as he boasted in the case of Colonel Moran, he could walk and crouch in such a manner as to take twelve inches off his height for several hours on end. His American tour was not a flippant diversion but the burnishing of an essential weapon in his armoury.

  Nor did he abandon criminal science. He began in 1879 only as a part-time actor in London, almost two years before our first meeting in the chemical laboratory of St Bartholomew’s Hospital. By day he was the self-taught student of scientific method. Every evening he attended the Lyceum Theatre, sometimes as a “supernumerary” spear-carrier, often as a “walking gentleman” without words to speak, occasionally as an understudy. After one or two small speaking parts it was evident that he had a voice of command and could silence an auditorium by his presence. He was allowed to understudy the part of Horatio in Irving’s production of Hamlet. At least twice during that time he was called upon to act the part. In later years he could truthfully boast that he had played Horatio to Irving’s Hamlet. It was a play for which he nourished a lifelong enthusiasm.

  As for Caradoc Price, later to be a household name, he was first of all among the most promising of Irving’s young men. Then, by resorting to the money-lenders, he bought for a song the effects and good will of the bankrupt Sassanoff Shakespeare Company. Within a week he announced to his friends that this “company” would seek its fortune in New York. He invited them to join him. You may judge the speed of his success by the fact that he repaid his entire loan within a year. Unfortunately, this convinced him that money would always be as easy to make.

  Holmes seized this chance to see something of the New World. With the rest of the company, he spent about eight months there. Upon their return to London, the lease of the Herculaneum Theatre in the Strand had fallen vacant. Caradoc Price used his growing reputation to borrow or beg every penny needed to take it on. Not long afterwards, following a visit by the Prince of Wales and a supper party, this enterprise became the Royal Herculaneum Theatre.

  Sherlock Holmes parted company with his theatrical friends on their return from America and went back to the chemical laboratory at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. There I found him in the spring of 1881.

  He never lost touch with the arts of the theatre. His impersonations of “Captain O’Malley,” when investigating the Camden Town murder, or Peter Piatkoff the Anarchist during the siege of Sidney Street, were so lifelike that I met him on both occasions without recognising him as my closest friend.

  It was not a matter of gumming whiskers to his face or assuming a theatrical tan. That would have done little. His personality would hold any audience because for that moment he was the very person he presumed to be. At the door of our lodgings I confronted the foreign ruffian who swore destruction to “Meester Sharelock Hoolmes,” as he called him. I never doubted that this was the terrorist Piatkoff, called “Peter the Painter,” until he burst out laughing in the unmistakable tones of my friend.

  Of all the figures from Holmes’s brief theatrical career with whom he grew acquainted in the Sassanoff Company, Henry Caradoc Price became by far the most famous. Even so, I do not think they met after 1881. A dozen times or so in the next ten years, Holmes and I sat in the stalls of the Royal Herculaneum, spellbound by the Celtic wizardry of Caradoc as Hamlet or Shylock or Falstaff. Yet there were no backstage visits and no admiring letters.

  Because we must now come to the death of this great Shakespearean, it is necessary for me to say something about his life.

  Those who recall the London theatre of thirty or forty years ago will need little reminding of Sir Henry Caradoc Price. At the height of his success, when his performances as Hamlet or Richard III were sold out long in advance, it was enough to speak simply of “Caradoc.” He was seldom out of the spotlight, whether as Bernard Shaw’s “vibrant and melodious hero,” as the younger cr
itics thought him, or Andrew Bradley’s “meretricious showman,” as he appeared to the purists. Caradoc did not hesitate to adapt the words or the actions of Shakespeare’s plays for his own purposes, often to superb effect. At the same time, he was not known for his humility. “The Bard of Avon may be a greater artist than I,” he replied to his detractors, “but I stand upon Shakespeare’s shoulders.”

  Caradoc’s past was as romantic as any stage production. It was even said that his greatest performance had been as the central character in his own life. He had come from childhood destitution. Born in South Wales, among the collieries and blast furnaces of Merthyr Tydfil, he was an “underground” pauper child in the coal mines of the Dowlais ironworks. At seven years old, he was employed to guard an “air door,” against the danger of an explosion from fumes and flame. He liked to recall how he fell asleep one day from weariness during his ten-hour shift, after the rats ate his bread and cheese.

  The supervisor, whose belt the children feared, caught him sleeping. Happily, this ogre was in company with Sir Josiah Guest. Sir Josiah owned the ironworks, collieries, railway, even the ships that carried his railway lines and wagon wheels round the world. Yet this liberal-minded patriarch had also been Member of Parliament for the Welsh industrial town since electoral reform in 1832.

  Sir Josiah founded a school where the children of the collieries and blast furnaces might receive an education. Caradoc Price was one of its first pupils. By eleven years old, he had a “voice” and could sing. His father was blacksmith at the ironworks forge and both parents attended Bethesda Welsh Congregational Chapel. The family sat every Sunday before the pulpit of Rhondda Williams and his evangelists. The boy listened and, alone on the mountainside, practised their rhetoric.

  England’s new young monarch and her consort invited the children of the Dowlais school to Windsor Castle. Caradoc sang Felix Mendelssohn’s “On Wings of Song” before Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Each child was rewarded with a gold sovereign, which the future Sir Henry Caradoc Price wore on his watch-chain to the end of his life. The Prince heard the child piping “O for the Wings of a Dove,” and recognised an artist. By His Highness’s patronage, the boy was elected to a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music.