by Lyndsay Faye
I appeared in his familiar office with hat in hand and was quickly waved into a chair. Lestrade, prim lips pursed in concentration, was penning a telegram. He finished the task with that air of officiousness, which always used to amuse me and to chafe my late friend, one I was happy to see again, and then clapped his hands with an expectant expression.
“Unpleasantries must be seen to first: I fear that I cannot take you up on your generous offer,” I told him. “I have been to the maritime offices today and there answered several advertisements for ships’ surgeons. My prospects are very good indeed. As I’m better than qualified, I’ve every expectation of gaining a berth.”
Lestrade, poor fellow, was most dismayed and attempted to dissuade me. But my mind was made up. He argued and spluttered and harangued for a quarter of an hour, and this when I had never before consulted him over so much as a train timetable. It is a lesson I shall take to heart not to misplace my friends once I have made them, for I cannot think of anyone else in London who would have so powerfully attempted to keep me here. When I had finally steered him round to my view of the matter, he rose and clasped my hand over his desk, frowning darkly.
“You’ll stop by for a pint before you make any final arrangements?” he pressed me.
I assured him that I would and stepped out into the thin light of Whitehall Place easier in my mind despite the disproportionate heaviness of my heart. It is the right choice—the only true choice. Now all that remains is to see it through.
My restless soul cannot wait to be packing a trunk, gaining a certificate of my own health from Anstruther, and leasing my practice until I decide whether or not I will ever want it back again. Holmes’s spirit inhabits these ancient cobbles as deeply as he inhabits my memory, and Mary’s gentle presence brushes her small fingers along every corridor of my house and practice. The isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that hurt as much as they delight. Once or twice, I had thought fleetingly of returning to California or even India, but such measures appear distastefully nostalgic.
What I seek cannot be found by traveling backward.
Soon I will be at sea. My skills are apt to the life, I think, at least temporarily. If they are not, I shall be tested, that is all, and this is what my circumstances demand: a place and a purpose.
I am a man who must be put to some use.
This morning I remembered a particular occasion in 1886 when Holmes had been in the dumps for four weary days, scraping his fiddle and ignoring my pained looks every time his morocco case made its sinister appearance. After an interminable interlude which would have tried the patience of a saint, let alone myself, he sat down at the breakfast table and—miracle of miracles—took an egg. I may have drily remarked as much, and his keen eyes feathered at their edges in that manner he had which meant that if only Sherlock Holmes had ever learnt to apologize, he might have done so.
Instead he coughed and snatched up the nearest paper.
“You look a trifle unwell, my dear Watson,” said he, nose-deep in the agony columns. “Never fear, I shall find us some occupation. You only want a little exercise—men of your sort can’t abide kenneling. Just pass the salt, there’s a good fellow.”
Holmes was not always right, though he would like to have been. But he was right on that occasion.
Before my departure in May or thereabouts, I’ve resolved that I shall pay a call to Baker Street and to Mrs. Hudson. I must see both again, ere I go. For the final time, I’ll look at the dining table, the lone cigar I know absolutely must still reside in the coal scuttle, the pair of armchairs before the fire. There is a botanical reference volume I left behind there in which I used to press occasional flowers during my engagement to Mary, all of them plucked by her during walks through London’s parks and byways and placed in my buttonhole; these dried artifacts I will gather, and lay at her gravestone.
Then, having let my own residence and said my goodbyes to the place, I shall have honored ghosts in every way I could, and leave such places behind me for a new life among strangers.
I feel much revived. The city’s harsh air is the sweeter to me now that a change is imminent, and one of which I am certain Sherlock Holmes would heartily approve. This strange business of Ronald Adair’s inexplicable murder piques my interest, for instance, and I may make some small effort at unravelling the matter as a final tribute to the wisest and most singular man of my entire acquaintance. Thereafter I shall quit the safety of dry land and tilt at windmills on the open sea. Come, tempests, come storms, come whatever Fate wills save sad indolence!
The time for great alterations is upon me. I can think of no sharper nor more constant reminder of my sorrow than my residence and that of Baker Street, the continual bitter quiet of an empty house.
Excerpt from the unpublished manuscript
“The Adventure of the Abernetty Family”:
Holmes, ever the masterful showman, held the kernel high in the air before the cook, whose healthy South American complexion blanched even as she bared her teeth in defiance.
“It is the deadliest substance in all the Amazon,” my friend declaimed, eyes riveted to the small brown shell as if it were a costly jewel. “Related to the castor bean, only a thousand times more potent. After careful processing, the native tribes can render it edible. But when raw, it is used as a lethal poison akin to ricin.”
“Of course!” I gasped. “Dear God, if only I had recognized the symptoms when greatly exacerbated. The fluid in the lungs combined with convulsions—”
“Precisely.” Holmes’s implacable gaze swept to the unrepentant face of the poisoner. “You extracted the oils and combined them with fresh butter, rendering the mixture softer than the usual. Today was hot enough for me to observe so, for the parsley had sunk into it, an impossible occurrence in dealing with pure butter. You fed the lethal concoction to every last one of the Abernettys, and following their metabolizing the stuff, they died in agonies. It was a monstrous vengeance.”
“I’d do it a hundred times over despite the fact you’ve found me out,” the cook growled in heavily accented English. “A family for a family. Ignatius Abernetty’s for my entire tribe, lost these fifteen years. What could be more fair? I saw to it they lived in fear of devils, but they never noticed the one beneath their noses!”
“There is no loss keen enough to justify your actions,” Holmes said with the sternness he acquires when confronted by unspeakable tragedy.
Her eyes burned as bright as the sun over the equator. “Yes, there is. You speak out of ignorance and not understanding. Have you ever been stripped of everything you love, Mr. Holmes?”
My friend, a shadow crossing his aquiline features, hesitated for longer than I have ever seen him do, as if trapped within the universe of his own morbid visions.
“No, I have not,” he said at last, speaking as if the weight of the world entire rested upon his shoulders.
“If not, can you imagine it?”
“I think I can, madam,” he answered gravely.
“If you can’t, then you don’t know what you’d do, to what lengths you’d go,” the cook whispered, “to feel whole again.”
Excerpt from the diary of Dr. John Watson,
April 5th, 1894:
The most strange, the most glorious, the most glad and inconceivable miracle of my life has just happened.
I must confess myself quite shaken; my hand leaps in sudden fits and starts across the page as I write this. My balking brain can make no logical sense of what took place, and I find myself often pausing simply to sit at my desk and allow my mind’s eye to erase the wall of this familiar study and instead to show me events as they just unfolded. I find myself watching them as an admirer of a particular play—or a singular performer—would return to the theatre time and again, gladly bearing money in hand to repeat the identical experience.
This was no farce, however, for all that a dis
guise in the form of an elderly bookseller played a part. The dramatic scene in my consulting room, the journey to the empty house, the changes in the wax dummy’s familiar profile—they were real. They must have been. My shoulder aches from when Colonel Moran tried despite the blow to his cranium to wrench himself away from my fierce grasp, and the high shriek of my friend’s summons on the police whistle remains in my ears even still.
My friend—I can hardly credit it.
Sherlock Holmes is alive, and what is more, now I am aware of the fact, and for the very gladdest of reasons.
Sherlock Holmes has returned to Baker Street.
The Adventure of
the Memento Mori
It will come as no very stirring surprise to the followers of these accounts that the spring of the year 1894 was a period of extreme adjustment for me in the deepest personal sense. I yet spent my days in sharp remembrance of the dear soul whose life had so brightened my own and, while black coats had eventually been put aside for quiet grey suits with sable armbands and jackets cut rather slimmer than of old, I still was forced to push away dark reflections. Feeling the loss of someone precious, I have found, never occurs when one expects it—when the attention snags upon a petite blonde passing in the street, or the ears catch strains of a dearly loved song. Mary lived in such disparate sights as scraps of embroidery thread and the hairline crack in our front doorstep that always used to vex her so, and rather than avoid her memory, I hoarded these reminders like the newly widowed glutton I was.
No less alarming, though a circumstance so impossibly joyful it often threatened to overwhelm my powers of basic comprehension, was the fact that Mr. Sherlock Holmes was now alive and relatively well and residing in Baker Street—and not, as I had weeks previously supposed, lost to me forever at the bottom of a merciless cauldron in Switzerland.
As my goal has ever been to polish my friend’s good name rather than tarnish it, and since Holmes’s soft-spoken and sincere account of his falsified death led me to conclude that both he and I had been in mortal danger prior to his . . . disappearance, I shall call it . . . I long endeavored to keep these records free from the suggestion that his return was both a cure and a wound, a burn and its balm. Sherlock Holmes had taken it upon himself to rid London of the vilest criminal network ever created, and apparently my part had been to mourn the fallen hero publicly. That aforementioned hero was still very much alive, however—one might even say spry now that he had eaten a meal or two and slept in a bed—and continually materializing upon the doorstep of my medical practice.
“Watson,” Sherlock Holmes announced after bursting into my consulting room and stopping half-poised upon his toes, “there’s work to be done!”
“Yes,” I sighed. “If I am to save this practice, a great deal of work is to be done.”
Holmes regarded me with the intensity a sable-headed magpie might devote to a glittering trinket obscured in a mound of rubbish. I sat at my desk, elbows resting upon paperwork which I did not wish to contemplate then or ever; Mary’s illness in its final stages had caused me to all but abandon my post as medico save where she herself was concerned, for there was something unspeakably painful about tending to mild attacks of gout and croup while my wife was dying. I could not bring myself to part from her, and whenever I attempted to maintain at least a semblance of a career, I found my attention too scattered to practice medicine responsibly in any event.
At first this negligence of mine was not at issue, for I had money saved. Now, having been on the verge of abandoning London entirely prior to my friend’s dramatic return, I was forced to contemplate the grim reality of my situation. This endeavor proved greatly hampered by my being dragged away at all hours of the day and night to investigate crimes. Why Holmes had determined following the affair I called “The Adventure of the Empty House” that he should invade my office with such regularity remained a mystery, but one I was determined to let lie. I am not, after all, the world-renowned sleuth.
My friend deposited a small object upon the accounting ledger before me. It was addressed to Sherlock Holmes, and he had presumably sliced the wrapping meticulously with a letter opener. Pulling back the brown paper, I discovered a used cigar box, and within it a small silver brooch nestled in crumpled newsprint. Though of no great value, it was a pretty trinket. A lock of raven hair, artfully curled, rested in the center of the ornament under polished glass. When I turned it over, I found it had been inscribed with the words “Omnes vulnerant, postuma necat.”
“ ‘All hours wound, the final one kills,’ ” I translated. “This is a remembrance of someone.”
“A memento mori, yes—at once a reminder of the particular departed and a philosophical meditation that every life is fleeting.”
I pushed it away. Holmes whisked his hat from his head and flung it deftly upon one of my two armchairs, followed by his overcoat, which was liberally speckled with raindrops. It had been a cold April, rain lashing down in frigid shards to shatter upon the cobbles, and the skies appeared not to have registered that it was now May. My friend leaned forward over my desk, pale eyes gleaming, with the faint dash of color along his cheeks that meant my morning was about to take a turn for the unconventional.
“I’ve accounts to settle,” I said pointedly. “You look much better daily, I am happy to note.”
“What?”
“When you first popped up like a jack-in-the-box, you were half-starved and as pallid as a corpse. This is a decided improvement.”
“Yes, well, Mrs. Hudson has been relentlessly forcing her heartiest Scotch stews upon me. It is a singular anomaly of human nature,” Holmes mused, continuing to scrutinize his mail with avidity, “that we as a species seem so compelled to mystify what is after all a natural cycle.”
“Not so very singular. I’m engaged at the moment, Holmes.”
“You are familiar with the Stoics? Of course you are. I’ve always been drawn to the notion that the mind of man is capable of distinguishing truth from fallacy through dispassionate reason, but back when we were all translating Seneca in our form books, I couldn’t help being struck by his preoccupation with mortality. Medieval philosophers built on that foundation to an almost obsessive regard for transi tombs, architectural renderings of angels snuffing out lights, and skeletons in fantastical states of disrepair.”
“Holmes.”
“While these artifacts are artistic enough in some cases, I always thought paying such extravagant attention to decay rather useless, since it isn’t as if we can stop the march of time simply by marking it. And of course, the practice of wearing physical tokens taken from the bodies of the dead dates back to ancient—”
“Eleven times.”
He blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Eleven times during the past fortnight, you have appeared here and have whisked me off to solve whatever conundrums the Yard has failed to clear up in your absence, and my practice was hardly flourishing before your arrival.”
My friend’s hand dived into the inner pocket of his frock coat, emerging with a folded note. “This accompanied the brooch.”
I took it. The missive went in this way:
I have read much of your exploits. Save me please, Mr. Holmes, for it is not too late. Single red and white tower rising, faint roar of the train, sun sets to the left, lightning-scarred elm, smell of death. Help me if you are able, for I can tell you nothing more, save that I know I cannot survive here.
Sherlock Holmes took several tense steps to the right of my desk, and then to the left, drawing his fingertips along the thin line of his lips. For myself, I admit that my pulse thrilled at the obscure but remarkably imperative plea. There can be no comparison between my interest in banking ledgers and my interest in mysterious appeals for aid.
“It came through the second post,” Holmes said in his usual clipped, precise manner. “As you can see, no return address is indicated. Peculi
ar.”
“That is unfortunate, for her message is most cryptic.”
“Yes, it is a woman’s writing.” Holmes’s eyes fell shut as he continued to pace. “Tell me what else you can deduce.”
“But I—”
“My dear fellow, I swear to you that your mind, with its altogether unpredictable limitations, is of the utmost value to my thought processes.”
My having been unintentionally slighted by Holmes for years and all too recently believing that I would hear such backward compliments no more, this remark failed to distress me. I lowered my gaze and did as he asked.
“The jewelry itself is unremarkable—as you said, memento mori are common enough.” Frowning, I lifted the receptacle. “The wrapping is ordinary brown paper, and the box constructed of inexpensive pine. I can draw no conclusions from either. Doubtless you’ve already identified the newspaper yourself?”
“The Evening News, first printing, day before yesterday.”
“Well, there you are, then. The accompanying note is hastily written and appears to be penned by an educated woman. Have I missed anything?”
“Of course you have.” Holmes made yet another abrupt about-face, tucking his tented fingers under his determined chin. “Though I fear that the physical evidence cannot lead us to a deduction regarding the exact whereabouts of this person. Other than the facts that the note was written in the dead of night, in a cramped, presumably secret space, and that the author has as little idea where she is as I presently do, and has more than likely been in some grim form of captivity for over five months, I can tell you nothing.”
“However can you have discovered all that?” I exclaimed.
He waved a hand in the air. “There are no fewer than three small drippings of tallow upon the surface of the box and one on the note itself. No great leap of judgment, therefore, to discern that she had both limited light and space in which to accomplish her designs—and since the matter is manifestly a pressing one, this roundabout way of describing her residence can only mean she doesn’t know herself. Otherwise, she certainly would have given me a specific locale.”