Holmes for the Holidays
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"This is the Tarot card known as the Magician," Holmes explained. "The four items on the table represent the four suits of the Tarot deck: swords, wands, cups, and pentacles."
"The five-pointed star!" O'Bannion exclaimed. "The gold coin with the star was a pentacle."
"Precisely," Holmes agreed.
"But what is the meaning of all this?" I cried. "Why should Sir Wilfred place such objects on his table?"
Holmes answered my question with a question. "Watson," he asked, "what was the exact date upon which Sir Wilfred died?"
"Why, early in the morning of December twenty-second," I replied, astonished that my friend should have forgotten so elementary a fact. "Three days before Christmas."
"No, Watson," Holmes admonished, with a shake of his head. "Sir Wilfred did not die three days before Christmas. He died instead on the holiday he had chosen to celebrate in its place: the winter solstice, which occurs between December twenty-first and December twenty-second. He hid the pagan symbols of that holiday beneath the trappings of an English Christmas, but the true meaning of holly and ivy precede the Christian era in England.
He invited others of his sect to partake of the holiday, and when they left, he embarked upon his own initiation as an adept, setting forth the items on the table and ingesting the sacred seeds."
"Then there was no murder after all?" O'Bannion exclaimed.
"There was no murder," Holmes repeated. "The late Sir Wilfred was an adept of the Order of the Golden Dawn, and as such, he aspired to an even higher state of spiritual knowledge and power. He prepared his study for a ritual that would take him, in the words of the note, 'across the abyss.' "
"Then the abyss does not refer to death, Mr. Holmes?" O'Bannion inquired; the relief in his voice was almost comical.
"In a way, it does," Holmes answered. His face was grave. "Do you know why the angel's trumpet is known as the sacred datura?" he asked. I shook my head, as did O'Bannion.
"Because it produces a type of mania that is believed to be conducive to spiritual visions."
Holmes stood and began to pace the small room. "I have read accounts of shamans who have ingested the seeds of the sacred datura," he went on. "They fall into a deep trance and appear to be dead. Then they rise from the dead and claim to have witnessed extraordinary visions and to have obtained occult knowledge. It is my belief that Sir Wilfred took the seeds of his own free will, seeking to 'cross the abyss' from worldly to otherworldly knowledge. The note was indeed written by Miss Charmian Carstairs's father, but it was not a symbol of revenge, but of a spiritual bond between father and son."
"But what of the angel, Holmes?" I cried. "Surely the angel with the golden trumpet must be a Christian symbol?"
Holmes shook his head. He lifted a slender hand and moved the Tarot cards about. At last he lifted one and showed it to me. It portrayed an archangel blowing a trumpet while gray figures emerged from their coffins. Underneath the card was written the single word Judgement.
"It is a card of the Tarot deck," Holmes stated. "Lestrade had never seen it before; he assumed it was a Christian picture."
"But, Holmes," I protested, "the brooch Miss Letitia Carstairs wore was of a rose and cross; do you mean to imply that she, too, was a member of this Golden Dawn? And if she was, why did she not come forward and make the truth of the ritual known to the police?"
"That question is easily answered, Watson," Holmes replied with a grim smile. "Mr. O'Bannion can tell us what happens to an heir who is convicted of murdering the testator."
"She would be disinherited," O'Bannion explained, "and the inheritance would pass to the residuary legatee."
"I think you will find that Miss Letitia Carstairs occupies that position in her late brother's will," Holmes said. "She not only hated her grand-niece, she intended to keep her brother's fortune for herself by refusing to explain that Sir Wilfred took the datura seeds of his own free will."
The testimony of Sherlock Holmes in the trial of the American heiress was a nine days' wonder. Kevin O'Bannion's motion to dismiss all charges against his client was granted amid much clamour in the courtroom. The headlines in the morning papers trumpeted the news of the Great Defender's latest courtroom triumph to an admiring public.
To Kevin O'Bannion, she was always the woman.
Or perhaps not. Holmes and I attended the opera last night (the incomparable Goldini was singing), and who should we see in a box but the Great Defender himself, escorting a lady whose raven hair and large gray eyes were reminiscent of the California poppy he had defended with such skill. But a closer look revealed her to be a pale copy of her American predecessor, whom I later learned had taken the first boat for New York as soon as she was released from prison.
We received a case of wine only last week. It bore a label showing rolling hills and the name Duclos Winery, Sonoma Valley, California. Holmes proclaimed the vintage, which bore the improbable name zinfandel, undrinkable (without actually tasting it), solely on the grounds that no vintage produced in the New World could possibly please an educated European palate. I, on the other hand, sampled a glass with last night's chop and found it most satisfactory, if a trifle young and forward, a quality that renders it not unlike the daughters of the great republic from which it came.
About the Authors
As the creator of historical mysteries with her Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels, Anne Perry is indisputably one of the world's most popular mystery writers. She lives in a small fishing village on the remote North Sea coast of Scotland.
Barbara Paul has a Ph.D. in Theatre History and Criticism and taught at the University of Pittsburgh until the late seventies when she became a full-time writer. She has written five science-fiction novels and sixteen mysteries, six of which are in the Marian Larch series. A new Marian Larch will be out in 1997, titled Full Frontal Murder.
Gillian Linscott is the author of six mysteries featuring suffragette Nell Bray. The latest, Dead Man's Sweetheart, will be published in 1996. Formerly a parliamentary reporter for the BBC, she currently writes full time. Linscott lives with her husband, also a writer, in their three-hundred-year old cottage in Herefordshire, England.
Gwen Moffat was born in 1924. She is a crime novelist living in the English Lake District. A mountaineer, she sets her stories in the backwoods, from the Scottish Highlands to the Rockies and south-western deserts. Her series characters are the urbane and formidable Miss Pink, and Jack Pharaoh, ex-Mountain Rescue, prickly, and battered by family disasters and a bad fall.
Loreti D. Estleman is the author of thirty-seven books, including the Amos Walker detective series, several westerns, and the Detroit historical mystery series: Whiskey River, Motown, King of the Corner, Edsel, and Stress. His first Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula, has been in print for eighteen years.
Jon L. Breen has written six mystery novels, most recently Hot Air (1991), and over seventy short stories; contributes review columns to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and The Armchair Detective, was shortlisted for the Dagger Awards for his novel Touch of the Past (1988); and has won two Edgars, Two Anthonys, a Macavity, and an American Mystery Award for his critical writings.
J.N. Williamson is a titular-invested member of the Baker Street Irregulars, and has been since he was nineteen. A long-time Holmes fan, he started writing and publishing articles on Sherlock Holmes when he was fourteen. A full-time writer now, he has thirty-seven novels and over one hundred and fifty short stories to his credit, as well as editing the acclaimed four-volume anthology series Masques.
John Stoessel has been a chemist, musician, scientific consultant, and investigator before turning to writing, particularly about Holmes and Watson. He has written three mystery novels, The Vatican Affair, The Oyster Affair, and The Vladivostok Affair, and is currently finishing The Great Western and Atlantic Affair, all featuring Holmes and Watson with classic Victorian backdrops. John lives in Duluth, Minnesota, with his wife and four children.
William L. D
eAndrea has won three Edgar Allan Poe Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, for the novels Killed in the Ratings and The Hog Murders and for the reference work Encyclopaedia Mysteriosa. He lives in Litchfield County, Connecticut, with his wife, mystery writer Jane Haddam, and their two sons.
Bill Crider is the author of more than twenty mystery, western, and horror novels as well as numerous short stories. Too Late to Die won the Anthony Award for favourite first mystery novel in 1987, and Dead on the Island was nominated for a Shamus Award as best first private-eye novel.
A multi-genre author of thirty-two novels, Carole Nelson Douglas writes about the only woman to outwit Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler, in four novels beginning with Good Night, Mr. Holmes, a New York Times notable book. She trades deerstalker for cat-ears to record the cases of feline sleuth Midnight Louie, winner of two 1995 Cat Writers' Association awards: best cat novel for Cat in a Crimson Haze, and a special short story citation.
Reginald Hill has written more than forty novels, including the well known Dalziel and Pascoe series. He has won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year, has been shortlisted for the MWA Edgar, and in 1995 was awarded the CWA Carder Diamond Dagger for outstanding contribution to the genre. He lives quietly in Cumbria, England, with his wife, Pat; their cats, Pip and Matty; and his conscience.
Edward D. Hoch, past president of the Mystery Writers of America and winner of the Edgar award for best short story, has published nearly eight hundred short stories and forty books. His stories have appeared in every issue of Ellery Queen since 1973. He and his wife live in Rochester, New York.
Carolyn Wheat's fourth Cass Jameson mystery, Mean Streak, was published in May 1996. "The Adventure of the Angel's Trumpet" introduces Cass's spiritual ancestor in the person of barrister Kevin O'Bannion (a cousin of John Dickson Carr's Patrick Butler). An Adventuress of Sherlock Holmes, Carolyn's investiture is The Penang Lawyer (Hound).
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