My nephew gathered her up in his strong arms and strode down the hall through an outer door into an enclosed courtyard with a stone bench. He held her until her breathing slowed to normal and she could sit unaided.
William seemed more worried than ever and asked if Dr Watson could diagnose Elizabeth’s illness.
Before he could answer, Sir Anthony, followed by Lady Anne and Mrs Manning, pushed through the small group of musicians and their friends who had gathered in concern. “I know an excellent doctor in Harley Street, Breckenridge. Allow me to send for him.”
Elizabeth tried to protest, but even Dr Watson urged her to submit to a thorough examination. It was agreed that he would come to their rooms next morning and join Sir Anthony’s doctor for a consultation.
With the immediate crisis past, we went back inside and talk turned to the mundane. William was warmly complimented on his performance and Dr Watson asked if he might borrow the score that Mrs Manning had collected from the piano rack. “I am no musician but there’s a passage in the first movement that I should like to examine, if I may.”
“Let me give you a fresh copy, sir,” said Mrs Manning, who started to open a leather portfolio.
“No need,” he assured her.
Despite her protests, he insisted. “This one will do nicely for my purpose. I’ll return it when I come tomorrow morning.”
Carriages were called for and Dr Watson escorted me back to Baker Street, where he retired to Mr Holmes’s old rooms. I had the maid put fresh linens on one of the beds and sent up a supper tray. It was almost like old times.
Next morning, I was up and out at daybreak, yet I managed to be seated by my niece’s side when Dr Watson and Sir Ernest Fowler, the noted physician, arrived at ten o’clock.
After a thorough examination, the two left the bedroom to confer.
“What is it?” William asked anxiously when they returned.
“Will she recover?”
“Thanks to Dr Watson,” Sir Ernest said. “Mrs Breckenridge, I’m told you suspect someone is trying to poison you?”
William looked thunderstruck when she nodded. “Poison?”
“Without Dr Watson’s help, sir, your wife would surely have died by the end of the month.”
“But how?” she cried.
“And who?” William demanded. “Why?”
“The how and the who I can tell you,” said Dr Watson. “The why will have to come from the poisoner’s own lips.”
He drew the Schubert score from his bag, along with a small glass vial. The score was sadly the worse for wear. The upper corners had been clipped off.
“Last night, I soaked the corners in water, then added iron sulfate to the fusion.” He held the glass vial up to the light. The liquid inside was a rich, dark blue. “Prussian blue,” he said.
“A positive test for cyanide,” Sir Ernest said approvingly. “Well done, Dr Watson!”
Elizabeth and William both seemed stunned. “Cyanide on the corners of the music?”
“You did not become ill from any food you ate,” Dr Watson told her. “It came from the music, carried to your mouth on your own fingers. Each time you rose to turn a page for your husband, I observed that you touched your thumb and index finger to your tongue to moisten your fingers. The corners of the score had been painted with a thin film of cyanide. The bitterness you might have noticed was masked by the strong peppermint drops you habitually use before and during a concert.”
“Mrs Manning!” William exclaimed. “Why?”
“That is something you can ask her yourself when the police have arrested her,” said Dr Watson.
“She will not be there,” I said quietly. “She has fled the country.”
My niece was bewildered. “Aunt?”
“I did not think you and William would welcome the scandal of an arrest and a sensational trial, so I went to Mrs Manning this morning and found her just as she was leaving for Victoria Station. When Dr Watson insisted on taking the Schubert score, she realised that all was over and she sails for Canada this very evening,” I said. “Mrs Manning confessed to me that she was much attracted to you when you first met her, William. You were kind to her and she felt the attraction was mutual. When you returned with a bride, she thought that if Elizabeth should sicken and die, you might turn your attention to her.”
“Never!” he said sturdily.
“She realises now the hopelessness of that dream,” I told them, “and she begged me to beseech your forgiveness.”
The April day was unusually mild and after leaving my niece in the arms of her husband, Dr Watson and I decided to walk a few blocks before hailing a cab. He expostulated on my impulsive act, but I would not admit that I had been wrong to allow Mrs Manning to flee. Scandal had been averted, William’s reputation would continue to grow, and Elizabeth was no longer in danger. What was to be gained by prosecuting that unhappy woman?
As we crossed the street to a cab stand near Piccadilly Circus, a newsboy was shouting the latest headlines of a mysterious death in Park Lane. After an evening of cards at the Bagatelle Club, a young nobleman had been shot dead inside a locked room.
“The very sort of puzzle that would have intrigued Holmes,” Dr Watson sighed wistfully as he handed me into the hackney.
With a heart that was equally sad, I reminded him of his promise to speak to Mr Mycroft Holmes and he agreed to go that very day.
We parted at my doorstep and I fumbled in my handbag for my house key while a thousand bittersweet memories whirled through my head as I admitted to myself the true reason I had gone to warn Mrs Manning. I had seen the flash in her eye when Lady Anne spoke so boldly to Elizabeth and I had felt a certain kinship. As a young widow, I too had once yearned for what I could not attain.
For what now could never be attained.
Alice met me in the vestibule. “A rather strange old gentleman has been waiting ever so long to see you,” she whispered.
Through the open doorway, I saw an elderly deformed man with a curved back and old-fashioned white side-whiskers. Upon seeing me, he rose to his feet with unexpected ease, straightened his back, and gave a familiar smile.
And then I fainted.
Margaret Maron is the author of twenty-seven novels and two collections of short stories. Winner of several major American awards for mysteries, she has received the North Carolina Award for Literature, her native state’s highest civilian honor. Her works are on the reading lists of various courses in contemporary Southern literature and have been translated into seventeen languages. She has served as national president of Sisters in Crime, the American Crime Writers League, and Mystery Writers of America. She lives with her husband on their century farm near Raleigh, North Carolina. Her brother received a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories one Christmas, but she was the one who read it cover to cover. Despite her upbringing as a daughter of the colloquial South, Maron was captivated by the formal language of nineteenth-century London.
Dr. Watson provides an account of the events that occurred shortly after Mrs. Hudson’s fainting spell in “The Empty House,” published in the Strand (1903) and collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
THE SHADOW NOT CAST
Lionel Chetwynd
The Rabbi sat in the main sanctuary of his synagogue and marveled at the understated beauty, a reminder of its nineteenth-century origin as Washington’s first place of Jewish worship. It was now, late at night, he loved it most: soft indirect light rimming the high ceiling, the shimmering backlit curtain of the Ark and its sacred Torahs, the eternal flame flickering. He fixed his eyes on the deep blue stained-glass window whose Star of David had been with the synagogue from its very beginning more than a century and a half ago. Tears welled in his eyes. He buried his head in his hands.
Perhaps he heard the stranger enter at the rear of the sanctuary, but if so, he gave no indication, only his hunched shoulders betraying his weeping. The man proceeded down the center aisle, coming to a definite halt at the Rabbi�
��s front pew. The Rabbi spoke without turning.
“You’re not unexpected,” he said, only then allowing his eyes to flicker to the stranger. At the sight of the visitor his eyes widened, his expression one of great shock. “You!” he half-whispered. “You came yourself!” The visitor said nothing. And so the Rabbi stood and walked to the aisle. “I considered your offer. But my mind is set. I must do as my conscience dictates. You might not understand.”
The visitor showed no emotion. Abruptly, he reached out, grabbed the Rabbi, and spun him around—snapping his neck in a single motion, the crack of the spine echoing through the empty sanctuary. Letting the Rabbi crumple to the floor, he strode to the Ark, opened it to reveal the Torahs dressed in fine silver breastplates and scroll handle sleeves. Taking a Hefty bag from his coat pocket he opened it roughly, and went swiftly and efficiently about collecting the silver.
Sergeant-Major Robert Jackson, his back to his students, stared out the seminar room window at the perfectly kept green expanse of the U.S. Army’s Carlisle Barracks. He approved of the order, the regularity. Even so, he could not deny the familiar feeling welling up inside him: boredom. Not that he didn’t like teaching at the Army War College; on the contrary, it was an honor to be here, where the Army boasted “tomorrow’s senior leaders are trained.” It was simply that he could only deal with so much theory. He was a soldier, and a good one, and so always listened for the sound of the guns. Fighting back the ennui, he turned to his class and looked out at the dozen or so captains, sprinkled with two or three lieutenants and one major. Ramrod straight, hair short, khaki uniform unwrinkled, razor-sharp creases, shoes spit-polished, it was impossible to know quite how old he was; perhaps fifty, but too fit to pigeonhole. He wore no ribbons on this day, only jump-master’s wings above his left pocket, Canadian paratrooper wings above the right. On his left shoulder was the screaming eagle patch of the 101st Airborne and on his right the Army College insignia. Now, even as he crossed the short distance to the head of the table, he was every inch the soldier’s soldier. A man who might be soft-spoken, but whose every word was authoritative.
“An officer in the field observing an enemy position applies five criteria: size, shape, shadow, color, and movement. These same elements should be used by a senior officer in any command situation where he is confronted by gaps in his knowledge.” He picked up the remote control for the oversized television monitor on the wall. “You are now, let us say, majors of infantry. Use those five elements to call down artillery on an advancing enemy you know is there, but cannot see.”
With a click of the remote, the monitor sprang to life. It showed a large wooded hillside, that seemed uniform, keeping whoever or whatever it concealed safe from sight. A lieutenant barked out, “Shape!” Jackson froze the frame and the lieutenant continued, “Upper left quadrant, eleven o’clock.” The rest of the class studied the picture; sure enough, trees in that area seemed very boxy. Jackson restarted the image and almost immediately a tank emerged. He clicked again and the hillside imagery reset.
This time, a major called, “Color, lower left, seven o’clock!” Indeed, those trees were just a bit too green, and once the film restarted an artillery piece fired, revealing its camouflage. Jackson again reset and now the answers came quickly.
“Size! Top left, ten o’clock!” offered a triumphant lieutenant who had spotted a pine tree simply too perfect, exposed by a zoom as a radio tower.
The next reset, a captain offered, “Movement, midfield.” A beat for them to realize the bushes there did move differently; quickly, insurgents emerged.
Jackson reset the image but no one had anything to offer. He let it run until, with a sigh, he stopped it. “Problem?” he asked. They seemed cowed, embarrassed—except for the class’s only woman, an attractive captain of perhaps thirty, wearing the insignia of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. She made firm eye contact with Jackson.
“The fifth element is shadow, but this field is overcast, no shadows possible.”
Jackson returned the steady eye contact. “Are you sure, Captain Snow?”
“As sure as I dare be, Sarn’t-Major.”
Jackson stood, returned to the window. It irritated him that she was in his class. He did not deceive himself by thinking it was an accident; she must have known she’d see him every day. Without turning, he answered with an authority intended to remind her who was in charge. “Shadow: verb, transitive. Middle English. From Old English sceaduwe, oblique case of sceadu. But it can be intransitive. Not the shadow you cast, Captain Snow, but the shadow you don’t. Upper left, please, ten o’clock. That copse reflects nothing at all.”
Still without turning, he clicked the remote and the frame zoomed into a comparatively dull patch of foliage, almost a matte finish. He let the zoom continue, finally revealing camouflage net disguising a command post. Another click and the image died. He turned and stared at her.
“Once again, Captain Snow, I remind you the good officer should always dare to be sure but not too sure. So, let us repeat the elements of observation.”
His students almost shouted in perfect unison, “Size! Shape! Shadow! Color! Movement!” He was satisfied. Until the silence was broken. By Captain Maggie Snow.
“Sound!”
The sudden hushed silence left no doubt she had crossed a boundary, her classmates avoiding even looking at her. Flustered, it was clear she wished she could call it back. She looked down at the table, avoiding the ever-placid Jackson who simply smiled slightly.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am?”
Her words came with difficulty. “I, er, just thought … in the modern world … where electronic communications are part of the battlefield … we might add sound. You know … heavy electronics tend to drive birds away, send animal life to ground. A silent forest is probably a dangerous one.” She waited for an awkward silence before adding uncomfortably, “Just a thought, Sarn’t-Major.”
“I shall ask the Army to consider your thought for a revised field manual, Captain. But not until you’ve all had your breakfast.” He came stiffly to attention. “Gentlemen. Ma’am.”
Relieved, they stood. He saluted smartly, waiting for their return salute before exiting and leaving Maggie to her classmates’ unenvious eyes.
Zakaria was tired, and even though he knew he was fortunate to be employed as the synagogue’s janitor, he had to work constantly at blocking out thoughts of where life had led him, and what might have been. America was fine but it wasn’t home and he missed the smells and excitement of the Soukh. At least the job was easy, nobody bothered him, and it was not unusual for him to begin work this late in the midmorning. And there were those special benefits; they were what kept him on the job. Pushing them from his mind, he trudged to the sanctuary, mop and broom in hand, opened the door wearily, and entered.
Something was wrong; the Ark was open. A deep dread clutched his stomach. As he slowly walked toward it, he caught a whiff of the familiar and unwelcome smell of danger, menace—just as he saw the rabbi. Dropping his mop and broom, he ran to the crumpled body and knelt, checking for a neck pulse with the efficiency of a man who has done this many times before. He knew there would be no pulse to be found. Shaking his head from side to side in grief, he reached for his cell phone, but then stopped. A frown crossed his face. Nodding to himself, he pocketed his cell phone, stood, scooped up his cleaning utensils, and exited, closing the sanctuary doors behind him.
Sergeant-Major Jackson was irritated. He had been pleasantly at ease in his favorite armchair, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius open to a favorite passage, the single ice cube in the glass of Talisker Isle of Skye whisky almost dissolved to where he felt confident the proper aromas and textures were now released in this favored malt, his music system ready for The Pipes and Drums of the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada to play “The Road to the Isles”—when his doorbell had roused him from his solitude. The invader was none other than Captain Maggie Snow, she of the certain answer to all quest
ions. She had allegedly come to apologize for conduct unbecoming in the afternoon seminar and he had not the temerity to refuse an officer—any officer—entry. But she was a woman, and he therefore insisted the front door of his modest on-base cottage remain open throughout her stay, and they keep in its line of vision.
As she entered his spare, minimalist home, he became uncharacteristically self-conscious; the one personal item on display was a photograph. No ordinary thing, it was he and his late wife, Bonny, on holiday. With Maggie’s parents. The two couples had been the best of friends, always together until the evil hand struck that dreadful afternoon. As quickly as that flooded his mind, he dismissed it, resolving to confront her with his suspicion she had joined his class only because of the personal connection. She began by explaining that her purpose for coming was to apologize. He shook his head.
“No. You came for absolution.”
“If you prefer,” she conceded.
“I cannot give you that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you outrank me. You are an officer. Ma’am.”
That stung her. “You once called me Maggie.”
“And shall again. On family or personal occasions. I daresay this is neither.”
When she asked why he so resented her, he replied he frankly doubted her motives for taking his class. JAG officers were lawyers, and while he might be a famed criminal investigator, this course was Field Command Training. As a lawyer, she would never hold a Line Command. So why take a course meant for true soldiers? She had countered that in the modern world officers did not command tactical engagement. Lawyers did.
He bitterly admitted to himself that, in this politically correct era he so despised, she was right. Division Commanders—generals, for goodness’ sake—had to be sure operations complied with law as it might be applied in civilian courts! Idiocy! There was a Uniform Code of Military Justice, an excellent document that had kept the Army an honest force, not some third world street gang in uniforms, thank you very much!
A Study in Sherlock Page 21