“Jim,” said the Boss. “And Maddie. That’s the team. You leave two days hence for New York.”
Morey rose in anger. “But Boss—,” he sputtered. “What about me?”
“Shut yer gob, Charlie,” retorted the Boss. A parcel bound up with twine landed with a plop in front of me. New clothes, to complete my transformation from British gentleman to Irish-American ruffian. Among the accessories, I noticed, was a revolver. “Wear it in good health, Jimbo,” he said. “And use it if you have to.”
Once again, all eyes were upon me, Morey’s most especially. Only this time, it was not a rain of brickbats and chamber pots, but rather the hushed breath of expectancy that accompanied their attention. Though her gaze was modestly diverted, I could sense Maddie’s blushes from across the room. “Terrific, Boss,” I said, then turned my glance to her. “Let’s blow this dump, Maddie. I’m goin’ bughouse here.”
The plan was that she and I were to pose as father and daughter. But Maddie demurred, arguing that despite our difference in age, it was far more common among our class that an older man take a younger wife than be seen traveling with a marriageable daughter. And so it was agreed. Over one objection, as you might well imagine. Indeed, Morey had been quietly but steadily seething in a corner of the room, and I did not like his look.
We were but small cogs in a much greater wheel of intrigue, so the exact use to which our “charitable” funds were to be put was never spelled out. But I had long since caught the drift: the Fenians, the IRB, and the Irish Republican Army were planning some kind of an uprising in the near future, perhaps in conjunction with some agents of the Kaiser based in rebellious Ireland; there were mutterings about the Dutchmen, which I knew was an American term for the Germans, and a rendezvous in Skibbereen.
And then it struck me—this was, perhaps, the reason Mycroft had sent me on this mission: to infiltrate the gang and find out what the Irish-American brethren were planning for the Ould Sod. What a fool I had been to mistrust him!
There was just one last missing piece of the puzzle. And only she could help me, help me see what I could not see for myself. At long last, I was piercing the veil.
Silently, she came to me that night. We spoke not a word. I slipped off my shirt. With her tender hands, she traced the markings on my back: a triangle within a circle. And suddenly, it was all clear to me. It was the same brand that Birdy Edwards once bore, and the corpse he had so devoutly wished to pass off as his own at Birlstone in order to make his escape from the Scowrers of Vermissa Valley a quarter of a century ago. The hand of a man long dead had reached out and touched my shoulder. The hand of Fate.
She kissed the back of my neck and then, moving lower, the wound, kissing the brand, kissing the mark of Cain that had been forever laid upon me.
I could hear the rustle of her shift as it dropped to floor, then felt her warm flesh upon mine. “Now we’re both comfortable,” she said.
There was revelry the next night in what passed for the Altamont’s ballroom to celebrate our departure on the morrow. The beer and spirits flowed.
Morey had been glaring and glowering at me all evening, and I smelt trouble brewing from this bonehead—trouble for which I was fully prepared, or so I thought.
“Come, Jim, let’s dance,” said Maddie. “If we’re to,” she blushed, “pretend . . . to be married, then we ought to act like it.” I took her sweet hand in mine and led her to the dance floor.
In a flash, the glowering Morey was upon us. “Take your filthy paws off her, you damned bastard!” he shouted. “Or, by God, I’ll send you straight to hell.” He shoved me, hard.
“No, Charlie,” cried Maddie.
“You belong to me!” he snarled.
“No,” she replied, with a quiet dignity that I shall never forget. “I belong to him, and there’s the end of it.”
Enraged, Morey lunged for her, bringing him directly into my path. I could not bear to let Morey’s Irish temper spoil that which now lay before me, nor its promise of happiness.
I struck him in the face with all my might. The same strength that unbent my poker after Dr. Roylott’s ministrations was summoned forth one last time. The whole room could hear the crack of the bone. For an instant, I thought I had killed him.
He stumbled backwards, reaching for his pistol as he fell. A shot rang out. I felt nothing. He had missed! I moved in for the kill. My Irish, as they say, was well and truly up. As I made ready to finish him—
—I heard my Maddie cry out. Instantly, all thoughts of further violence were forgotten; I turned to see her, lying on the floor. As I rushed to her side, I could see at a glance that the wound was fatal.
“Water!” I shouted.
The best I could do was make her as comfortable as possible before her final journey into that land of Mor that the Irish know so well. I cradled her dear head in my arms. Her eyes were wide and so blue.
“Be true to me, Jim,” she gasped. “On the blood of my father, be true to me!”
“Birdy Edwards,” I said, quietly. Her eyes told me the truth. She had known all along.
The chastened crowd moved forward, to hear the dying colleen’s last words. “God, how I hated him for his treachery, even as I admired him for his bravery. How I love the people he betrayed! And how I love him for betraying them!”
Somehow, she found the strength to raise her arms and point at the people in the room, sweeping them all up in her dragnet. “And you!” she cried. “How I hate you for what you did to him, and for what you made him do.” Her head dropped back into my arms.
Her strength was gone, and I knew the end was near. Somehow, she found the power to extract something from the folds of her dress and press it into my hand. It was the letter from Mycroft, now stained with her blood.
I put my ear to her sweet lips. “Promise me, Jim, you’ll never waiver. Never despair. Never falter.”
“I promise, Maddie.”
“Tell me you love me,” she said, the fierce light in her eyes subsiding.
“As no other.” It was just moments now. “And forever.”
“Then sing to me. One last time. The song at twilight.” She gasped and shuddered.
I sang: “Still to us at twilight / comes Love’s old song / comes Love’s old sweet song . . . ”
I never stopped singing to her, even after she lay quite still and silent in my arms.
The rest of my story is quickly told. I chased Morey across the sea, to Ireland and Skibbereen. He had gone to ground, seeking shelter with the IRA, but of course it was child’s play for Jim McKenna, a fellow Irish-American, to find him. As I had done so often in London, where young Irish boys had been legion among my Baker Street Irregulars, I quickly organized a flying column of street Arabs, which fanned out across all the public houses of the town. In less than a day I had my answer: “The Wild Geese.”
I slipped in incognito: cap tugged down low, hunched over, a tremor in the hand that held my walking-stick. Morey, on the other hand, was his usual loud, vulgar, and expansive self. I spotted him at a table in the corner, gesticulating wildly at a Prussian gentleman whose monocle and dueling scar proclaimed both his ancestry and his attitude.
As I edged closer, I heard him say, “ . . . von Herling. Now a deal’s a deal and if you’ve even half a mind to double-cross me well, buster, you had better watch your step.”
The German sneered across his beer. “Do you think you can impress me with this belligerence?” he asked with a deprecatory laugh. “Look around this room; there are twenty men I could hire to work for us. Why do I need you?”
I noticed there were four empty pint glasses in front of Morey. Two went flying as he gestured wildly. “Damn you, I thought we were on the same side!” he shouted.
“Simply because the enemy of my enemy can be my friend does not mean that you and I have to like each other,” replied the German. “Quite the contrary.”
Morey’s face flushed and he started to rise. I could not let him do anything rash, not wit
h my revenge so near to hand. I needed a diversion and the pint of Guinness in my left hand would do nicely.
The stout splashed him from head to toe. Enraged, he leapt up, the Prussian temporarily forgotten. Feigning unawareness in my senility, I passed through the side door, the one the urchins used to nip in and out of as they dragged foaming growlers back to their drunken fathers at home.
“You there! Old man!” he screamed, but pretending deafness, I ignored him. The room jeered as he struggled to his feet.
I was in the alley and waiting for him when he burst through the door. Cap off, upright and cold as death was I. “McKenna!” he said, staggering back against the door. This was just the effect I had hoped to produce, for our confrontation needed to be quick and final; the intrusion of strangers would have been most unhelpful at this point.
“Go for it,” I said.
He went for it.
I fired two shots to his one. Both mine found their mark. His did not.
Morey’s body sagged, then sat heavily as his life’s blood ebbed away. I could hear pounding on the other side of the door as the pub’s denizens were roused by the commotion. I waited just long enough to watch the light in his eyes flicker out and then into the rubbish went the elderly McKenna’s hat, stick, coat, and as much else as I could strip off in the few moments allotted to me, revealing the oil-stained, motor-car tradesman’s garb beneath.
I walked round to the front of the pub and entered just as a few men had managed to push the body aside and force open the door. As the hue and cry for the police went up, I took a seat near the German and tugged ever so slightly on my goatee. He looked at me and gave me a small nod of acknowledgement, but not of betrayal.
“What’ll it be, sir?” asked the barmaid.
“Nothin’,” I replied, my Irish-American accent plain. “I’ve changed me mind.” I nodded in the direction of the German: “Good evening to you, fine sir,” and took my leave.
For a short while, the local constabulary were very much mystified, especially when they discovered the old clothes and the American revolver, but they were used to drunken Irishmen murdering each other, and quickly lost interest in the case, and so I made my way across the Irish Sea and on to London without further incident. The next day, I was back on the South Downs, among my bees, making some observations upon the segregation of the queen.
Sussex, July 1914
It did not surprise me when Martha announced Mr. Mycroft Holmes. By rights, I ought not to have received him. That such a conniving mind could comfortably reside within such a portly and indolent exterior . . . I realized that, not for the first time, I had underestimated my own brother.
It had been, I had to admit, sheer genius on his part to insinuate me into the Irish-American underworld of Birdy Edwards’s own hometown, and send me to the one person who could have successfully infiltrated me into the mob. But how did he know she would? I took the letter, stained with her blood, from my billfold and, smoothing it out, laid it flat upon my study table. “Show Mr. Holmes in,” I said.
“Sherlock!” he exclaimed, as if he had half-expected never to see me again. He extended his hand, but I let it dangle, as we said in Chicago.
“I brought this back to you,” I said, gesturing toward the letter. “Full circle.”
For a moment, my brother was something he almost never was: nonplussed. The sight of the blood—her blood—on the letter, I believe, unnerved him. But he quickly regained his composure.
“We had had our eye on the girl for some time,” he began. Was there a hint of apology in his manner? “Ever since the tragedy of Birlstone, in fact. After the death of her father, we sent her small anonymous remittances and made sure our agents looked in on her from time to time. In fact, it was we who suggested the alias, McParland, to protect her from the Moriarty gang’s American henchmen. A most conflicted, troubled young woman. A tragedy.”
I said nothing. My silence was remonstrance enough.
“Damn it, Sherlock, what could I do? If I had told you what His Majesty’s Government was about, you would have refused outright, Asquith or no Asquith; after all, you’d already turned Grey down. And I knew that your love of a mystery would keep you in the Great Game, as it were. And you have done brilliantly. I am very proud of you.”
At last, I found my tongue, and it was all I could to tame it. “All of this—for what? For me to ‘keep tabs’ on a few Fenians? And at what cost?” I felt myself growing hot under the collar. “If His Majesty’s government cannot watch a few sad-sack revolutionaries in Dublin, then what hope is there for it?”
Mycroft looked me up and down, as if I were still his younger brother, playing with tin soldiers and hobbyhorses in our bedroom so many years ago. “You still don’t understand, do you?” he said at last.
At this point I must confess that I lost my temper. “What is there to understand?” I cried, clutching at the letter. “Your own words condemn you!”
His eyes shuttled back and forth inside his head, and not for the first time was I reminded of the very strong affinity, intellectually speaking, between Mycroft Holmes and the late Professor Moriarty. Both of whom now had the blood of the McParland family on their hands. I looked down at the letter, her red bloodstains fading, the paper already taking on the appearance of parchment, receding into history along with what was left of my heart.
“We—I—trusted her to do the right thing. And so, it appears, she did. Read it aloud, please.”
My hands were shaking as I looked at the epistle. “‘My dear Miss Edwards: The gentleman who bears this letter is the man who both saved your father from the gibbet and yet condemned him to death. He is in need of a redemption that only you can provide. Do with him as you will.’”
There was nothing further to read, but the letter’s contents did not end there. At the bottom, instead of a signature, there was simply a mark: a triangle within a circle. Her blood had swamped this bit, rendering it a dark brown stain, like the brand I had seen on Birdy Edwards, and the corpse at Birlstone. Like the brand I now bore on my back. The Trinity and Eternity. The solution to the final problem.
I let the missive flutter to the ground. At last, I understood.
“This has nothing to do with the Fenians, Sherlock. Or the Irish. It was always about the Germans, who mean to have war, and war they shall get. They would never have trusted an English turncoat, especially not one of recent vintage. Furthermore, although you were retired, we needed you out of the country, that the memory of Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street and the South Downs might fade. But an Irish-American named James McKenna . . . ”
“Is dead,” I said. “And dead he shall stay.” My promise to Maddie overrode everything, even my loyalty to the Crown, even my blood ties to my brother. Sherlock Holmes’s undying loyalty was and always would be to England, but Jim McKenna would never betray her. There was another sort of loyalty, that which Maddie had taught me, and if that were the higher, then so be it.
“Very well, then. May he rest in peace. But there is now a nobleman of the Hun persuasion in fact, who very much desires to meet with you. In fact . . . coincidentally... he is living not far from here. I think you take my meaning.”
I smiled, reflecting the memory of her last smile, a memory that would never leave me. Where Mycroft was concerned, there was never a coincidence; in the chess game of life, he was always two moves ahead. “What is this Junker’s name?”
Mycroft exhaled in relief. “Von Bork. Funnily enough, a colleague of your friend, von Herling, whom you encountered in Skibbereen. You shall enter his service on the morrow.”
So Maddie had not died in vain. For King and Country, and for the United States of America, she would always live. “Agreed,” I said, my nostrils flaring. Truth to tell, I was looking forward to a second encounter with the sneering Prussian and his agent in my country.
Business settled, he rose to leave. “One last question,” Mycroft said, on his way out the door. “If James McKenna is dead, by what nam
e shall you call yourself?”
“Altamont,” I replied.
MORIARTY, MORAN, AND MORE : ANTI-HIBERNIAN SENTIMENT IN THE CANON
Michael Walsh
Michael Walsh, the former music critic of Time magazine, is the author of the novels Exchange Alley, As Time Goes By (the prequel/ sequel to the movie Casablanca), and And All the Saints, a winner of the 2004 American Book Awards for fiction. His latest novel, Hostile Intent, was published in September 2009 by Kensington Books. Under the name “Michéal Breathnach,” he contributed “The Coole Park Problem” to Ghosts in Baker Street. For good measure, he co-wrote with Gail Parent the 2002 hit Disney Channel movie Cadet Kelly.
Few figures embody both a place and an era like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Fewer still conceal such a welter of internal contradictions beneath such a confident—but deeply misleading—exterior.
The very image of the late Victorian British Empire, Conan Doyle was born in Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh, and came to consider himself the very soul of Englishness, and yet—on both his father’s and his mother’s side—was descended from a long line of Irishmen, and Catholics to boot. A Catholic in a Presbyterian city—no matter its large number of his co-religionists; an Irishman in England; and an Englishman to the world: it is little wonder that these stresses would so bedevil their author that only his most famous creation could give them voice, and resolution.
“I am half Irish, you know,” Conan Doyle once said, explaining an outburst of temper, “and my British half has the devil of a job to hold the hotheaded rascal in.” So far, so stereotypical: the image of the quicktempered Hibernian was one already long established in the British hierarchy of racial classification. And, indeed, Conan Doyle himself seemed to accept the conventional archetypes of Irishness, using them as a kind of handy shorthand to explain some “un-English” behavior or other. Stumping for a Liberal Unionist candidate, he recalls in Memories and Adventures that he found himself being pushed on stage to address an audience of three thousand: “I hardly knew myself what I said, but the Irish part of me came to my aid and supplied me with a torrent of more or less incoherent words and similes which roused the audience greatly, though it read afterwards more like a comic stump speech than a serious political effort.” Temper and the gift of the gab: two hallmarks of the stage Irishman, which Conan Doyle obviously, desperately, did not want to be.
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