She appeared not to have heard me. “There is no thief worse than the thief who is in the house,” she whispered, running her gloved fingers through the pile of red rosary peas in her box.
We sat quietly for a while. I had not been a priest long, but I had begun to catch the tell-tale signs of a penitent who wished to confess. “Would you—like to speak to me in private, Sister?” I asked.
But I had misread the signs. She looked up at me with surprise and then displeasure. “In my case, Father, confession would be a self-indulgence.”
Apparently there was no more to be said.
I passed the next day struggling over a letter to the bishop informing him of my ‘eagerness’ to comply with whatever demand he would make of me. Of course, it was on Holmes’s insistence that I become “the fervent recruit.” Now it was only a matter of waiting until the weather warmed and the ice “returned from off the earth.”
At last one morning there was a sound of melting water and the postman returned like the dove with the olive bough to deposit a week’s worth of mail at our feet. The city streets stirred once more with the rush of a pent-up populace. Determined to find Holmes without delay, I sallied out after mass to find the inn on Meeting Street where he was lodging. I had to wade through lumps of ice and wood litter, cautiously avoiding a catastrophe on the slick mess the storm had made of the streets, and at last got to the doors of the inn. There I found that Holmes was a guest but had not been seen since the storm began.
Alarmed, I climbed the stairs to his room along with the innkeeper, who was showing some rather belated concern. After I called out several times with no result, the man opened the door with his master key.
Inside was a deplorable spectacle. The shutters had been jammed shut, the light was dim, and a fog of stale smoke filled the room. On a meager cot lay Holmes, his gaunt, wasted eyes staring up at the ceiling, and I feared the worst.
“Quickly!” I shouted. “A doctor!”
The now fearful innkeeper plunged down the stairs.
Chapter 30
Holmes was barely breathing. I was certain he had eaten nothing in days, but what truly shocked me was the tarnished metal syringe that lay on a chair next to his bed. Someone—perhaps himself—had injected him with morphia or some such noxious substance.
The room stank of sick and sour tobacco. I tried cleaning Holmes and stuffed the wild clutter in the room back into his bags. I found a small bottle of the drug, which I corked and put in my pocket, as well as an unopened bottle of London gin.
At last the doctor arrived, a portly gent who twisted his beard with his fingers and shook like an old drunkard. Indeed he was a drunkard and cheerfully confessed it.
“I’ve been drinking since the storm started. I stopped when the storm stopped and the drink ran out. In a few hours I will be in much the same state as your friend here,” he laughed.
I said that I could not understand why people treat themselves so ill.
“Why, the best thing life is intoxication!” the doctor said. “During the war I saw the hectic of death on hundreds of men—men with heads or hearts shredded like persimmon pulp—boys with strong bodies who a second later were nothing but a wine splash across a hillside. The living ones, the ones who would rather die than suffer one more day chopped in pieces … I gave them the best time they ever had in their miserable lives. Morphia, spirits, laudanum … until it ran out.”
“What of my friend?” I asked impatiently. “What can be done?”
“Your besotted friend?” With an idle air the doctor examined Holmes up and down. “The best thing you can do for him is to keep dosing him. He looks the very picture of utter desolation. Why return him to his misery?”
“Because he is desperately needed. Now, what can be done?”
The doctor paused and sighed. “If you are so determined, you must destroy the drug. He will have hidden quantities of it in this room. Find it and burn it—or sell it to me. I’ll pay …”
“I will not. What else?”
“Nothing else. Keep him as comfortable as possible, give him fresh water to drink, and then watch him suffer. It will be excruciating.”
“What will?”
“When I was a boy it was known as the ‘blue johnnies,’ but we learned men of science call it the delirium tremens, Reverend suh. He will awake near midday craving the drug. He will be anxious, irritated. Then the sweats and the aches begin. His stomach will cramp and all night he will scream in terror at the vermin crawling over his body—rats, snakes, worms, vile sea snails, oysters and such. He may scratch himself bloody. Through it all he will curse you to hell and back. In three days or so it will pass.”
“And then?”
“And then comes the worst thing of all: Sobriety.”
I thanked the man of science and paid him with the bottle of London gin.
“I am gratified, Reverend suh, gratified indeed.” As he left he whispered, “Give him the last rites, or whatever it is you do to send a soul on to glory. A skinny fellow like that probably will not live through what’s coming.”
I sent a note back to the rectory pleading with the nuns to take over my catechism classes and stayed beside Holmes day and night. The doctor was right about the course of Holmes’s torment—things unfolded exactly as the old sot predicted. I have never, before or since, seen any being suffer as Holmes did. I embraced him to keep him from injuring himself with his wild leaps and tremors. I soaked up the prodigious sweat with a towel. His horrorstruck screams about crawling insects even made me look round in fear.
In his quieter moments I scoured the room and found small bottles of morphine in utterly unlikely places—in a stocking, in his hatband, rolled into a copy of the Post and Courier—then I incinerated them in the fire. I thought I had found them all until I picked up the only item of food in the room, a wilting orange on a side table. To my surprise the orange came apart in my hand and out fell another container. Holmes was a devious chap.
Then, on the morning of the third day, he awoke dry and calm. I called for weak tea and toast, which he took without complaint. Relaxed, unruffled, he obeyed me like a child, bathed himself, shaved, even lay down again to rest on my orders. It worried me deeply—I had never experienced a tranquil Sherlock Holmes before. But it was his eyes that troubled me most. They were dead. Lifeless.
After his nap I helped him down the stairs and out to a restaurant for a light lunch. He needed sustenance. He was straightforward with me.
“I am not sorry,” he said. “When we could make no sense of the cryptogram, I rebelled at it. Quite abruptly the entire structure of the case collapsed in my mind, and I came to believe I had been weaving a vision out of a baseless fabric. It melted into air—into thin air. Perhaps the ciphers were the work of some crank. Perhaps the Tarleton men had died like any other soldiers. Perhaps I who dismiss the imagination as a pageant without substance had fallen prey to my own imaginary folly.
“And then I received a wire.”
I was surprised. I had found no telegram in his room even with all my searching.
“You know we suspected Thomas Beaufort of the golden spurs to be the real murderer of the Tarletons. His malicious scheme to stop your inquiries, his clear connection to the poison poem you received, his accusation of James as a scapegoat for the crime—it all added up.”
“Yes, and from my point of view, it still does,” I said.
Holmes extracted a telegram from the lining of his coat and held it up between two fingers. “It is from the War Department. ’Dear Sir, In response to your inquiry, the rebel Colonel Thomas Beaufort served with his brother, General Abraham Beaufort, mostly in the western campaign of the war. Together they fought at Vicksburg and ended the war under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest’—who, I happen to know, was the leader of the Ku Klux Klan… .”
“That might explain the Beauforts’ co
nnection with the Klan.”
“Indeed. But it doesn’t matter now.”
“Why not?”
“The wire goes on to explain that during the Battle of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863—the day the Tarletons were killed—the Beaufort brothers were retreating from a Union army at Tullahoma, Tennessee, seven hundred miles away.”
“So the Beauforts did not murder the Tarletons?”
“They were not even in the same state at the time,” Holmes sighed dismissively.
“But what of the mention of Adam Worth in the cipher?”
“It is an intriguing point. Perhaps even decisive,” he murmured, absorbed in the luncheon menu. Very strange. Now I was truly worried about him. He appeared to have lost all interest in the case, so I asked him if that were so.
“It is less a case for investigation than flotsam on the inexorable tide of history,” Holmes replied. “There are certain irresistible forces—the power of money, the power of hatred, for example—that are impervious to our attempts to counter them. We must either destroy these forces or agree to live on their terms; and since I can do neither, my small bottles seem to me the only reasonable response to the dilemma.” He rolled up his shirt cuff and revealed innumerable puncture marks.
“But Holmes, you must count the cost! You cannot simply withdraw from the scene in a state of blissful arousal while men like Adam Worth remain free to do their worst.”
“Adam Worth is merely a parasite on a dying world. Men like James, women like Katherine Wells, will continue to be enslaved in more and more novel ways. Millions will die in wars for the profit of men like Adam Verver as iron and machines are transformed into nightmarish weaponry we cannot even imagine. Hateful bigots will refine and scatter their venom until it consumes the nations. And, like maggots, Adam Worth and his kind will hang and feed on the death of all things.”
I had never heard this kind of outpouring from Holmes. The calmness of his voice made it all the more appalling in its effect on me. But then I had a thought.
“I am reminded of an evening long ago in our digs at Stonyhurst.”
“Yes?”
“When you demonstrated a highly efficient procedure for killing maggots.”
Holmes’s face gradually relaxed into a sort of smile. “Ah. I remember. It seems to me that you found that little experiment revolting.”
“So I did. But I also remember that you found it fascinating. You believe that your only alternative is to withdraw into stagnant dreams, but that is not so. You are a scientist. Problems, cryptograms, the secrets of men and nature—it is mental exaltation you crave. You said yourself it is the mystery that matters!”
Holmes was gazing at nothing. I was not sure he had heard me, but then he said, “That … and shag tobacco.”
I laughed. It was a weak, tentative laugh. Our luncheon came and we ate in silence. Afterwards, he lit a pipe and we went for a stroll in the brisk air along Meeting Street. Shabby black men under an overseer were clearing the street of ice and filling in holes in the paving. Holmes said nothing until he spotted a poster on an advertising column.
“Look at this. The great Camille Urso is playing tonight at the Hibernian Hall.”
“Who?”
“Urso, one of a handful of female concert violinists in the world, and from what I have heard, truly accomplished. I wonder if we might go.”
Pleased that Holmes was showing interest in something—anything—besides injecting himself with poison, I readily agreed to go with him.
That evening we each paid our two dollars and took seats in the Hibernian Hall, nicely lamp lit and surprisingly warm for such a cold evening. The orchestra played some pleasant music and then a soloist entered, a sparkling, roundish French woman who played Mendelssohn’s violin concerto. This was Madame Urso.
I was gratified to see Holmes lost in the music. He listened with eyes closed, swaying just perceptibly and tapping his finger in time. “German music is introspective,” he had said when we entered, and he was clearly introspecting. As the concerto unfolded, his countenance became more languid, even dreamy, so unlike the keen-edged machine brain I had come to know. I prayed that henceforth music might take the place in his life occupied by the hateful drugs that had nearly killed him.
After the concert we wandered the hall so that I could show Holmes the painting of Jeb Stuart, the knight of the golden spurs, and his heroic beard. Holmes contemplated the face. “A narcissistic type, I would say, given to the dashing gesture. But the beard conceals an irresolute chin. Were I Robert E. Lee, I would have placed little faith in him.”
We followed the crowd toward the exits, and I stopped Holmes to show him the “Battle of the Golden Spurs” hanging in a place of honor by the arched doors. “General Gary told me it was a recent gift to the city of Charleston from himself and his friends.”
Once again I contemplated the scene of maddened peasants hacking at the knight with blood surging from his body.
“It is not the original,” Holmes reflected in a drowsy monotone. “I believe it to be a preliminary study—as you see, the paint strokes are tentative and the lines somewhat unsettled… . Great Scott!”
Abruptly he came to life. His pencil came out and he scratched notes on his concert program as he bent like a great bird over the tiny plaque on the picture frame.
“What is it?” I asked. “What do you see?”
“Quickly!” he hissed. “We must be gone. We have no time to lose.”
Chapter 31
We locked ourselves into my cell at the rectory. Once the lamp was blazing, Holmes laid out the papers we had struggled over days before in our attempt to decipher the Katherine Wells document.
“Ah! This is it!”
He had found the last page we worked on.
“COURTRAIB,” he spelled out. “We got that far and abandoned the effort. Let us continue now.”
“But, Holmes, it’s gibberish.”
“Not at all. Look at this.” He handed me his program from the concert and pointed to the notes he had scratched out with his pencil:
“BATAILLE DE COURTRAI, DITE BATAILLE DES EPERONS D’OR”
It took me a moment to absorb the shock. “The Battle of Courtrai, called the Battle of the Golden Spurs,” I translated. “Courtrai?”
I looked at the cipher boxes on the table: “C-O-U-R-T-R-A-I-B. The Battle of Courtrai! Holmes! It’s not gibberish after all!”
“No indeed. Courtrai must be a town, the site of this obscure battle in 1302 that became known as the Battle of the Golden Spurs. We found our way through Mrs. Wells’s labyrinth without realizing it!” Holmes looked up at me eagerly.
“I cannot remember how we did it.”
“But I can. I’ve rolled it over and over in my mind since then. The Compass gives us a degree for each box, the Triangle gives us a number for each box, and the Spiral a letter for each box. The alphabet is arranged round the Spiral, beginning with ‘A’ at the center. The message starts with ‘COURTRAIB,’ which must have something to do with the Battle of Courtrai. Now we must puzzle out the rest of it.”
With my wooden ruler I traced out another set of boxes. Then I inserted the letters next to the numbers on the cipher as Holmes read them to me.
“Number 1 at 3 degrees gives us the letter E.”
“Number 4 at 11 degrees gives us the letter G.”
“Number 10 at 20 degrees gives us the letter I.”
“Number 1 at 1 degree gives us the letter N.”
“Number 15 at 20 degrees gives us the letter S.”
“We have it!” Holmes cried. “COURTRAIBEGINS. The Battle of Courtrai begins? What could it mean? We must not theorize yet. Let us continue.”
The next few boxes gave us JAN28.
“So the battle begins January 28. Only days from now. I wonder what the date signifies.”
We kept at it. “S-H-E-R-M-A-N-A-R-R-I… .”
“That’s it! Sherman arrives! Quickly, Tuck, the newspaper.”
For the next half hour we ferreted through the stack of Post and Couriers I kept for kindling. Holmes scanned at great speed, tossing sheets of newsprint in all directions, and at last gave a gleeful shout. “Here, Tuck, here!” He handed me a paper several days old.
I read, “On January 28th, General William T. Sherman will return to Atlanta, the scene of destruction and disaster under his command, and will look upon a proud city, prosperous almost beyond compare, throbbing with vigor and strength; and upon a people brave enough to bury their hatreds in the ruins his hands have made, and wise enough to turn their passion away from revenge… .”
I read further to find that Sherman’s visit to Atlanta had been in view for some time, and that the governor, the mayor, and many city worthies would welcome and attend on him.
“Perhaps someone intends to carry on the project begun by John Wilkes Booth,” Holmes exclaimed. “The painting of the battle might suggest such a thing.”
“That was my thought exactly,” I picked up. “The battle of Courtrai was fought by a people who had been conquered by a greater power some years before. That battle began with the garroting of the enemy general.
“Similarly, Sherman conquered and occupied the South, and now he is making a polite visit to the city he burned to the ground in the Civil War. It will be Courtrai re-fought! General Sherman’s life is undoubtedly in danger!”
Holmes drew on his pipe and leaned again over the papers on my table. “We are probably on the right scent, but it is unwise to let our theories run too far before the facts. We must finish deciphering this most revealing message.”
Interpretation of the cipher went quickly now, and soon all was before us.
[The Wells cipher completely worked out by Holmes and Simon.]
33-3 C
The Tarleton Murders Page 22