“And Mr Howell?”
“We are advised by that estimable weekly paper The Winning Post and Sportsman’s Weekly that he has indeed been gathered to his fathers.”
“With his throat cut?”
“I should take the liberty of doubting that. I think it more likely that when he was taken into the Home Hospital in Fitzroy Square—with pneumonia shall we say?—he seized the chance of putting about a story that would deter his creditors once and for all. Unfortunately for him and, I imagine, rather to his own surprise he then succumbed in reality to this pneumonia. I rather think he is now beyond justice of the sort administered by judges of the Central Criminal Court.”
“It was not revenge of some kind?” I asked,
Holmes shook his head.
“As for the coin wedged between his teeth, you may forget the underworld of Naples. More probably, the loyal fingers of Rosa Corder or some other classically-minded acquaintance placed it there to pay Charon the ferryman for the crossing of the Styx into Hades.”
“And the cutting of the throat was an incision in the trachea to the bronchial tubes to assist his breathing?” I asked sceptically.
“It would not be unknown.”
Pen Browning interrupted.
“What of the volume of Sonnets in his pocket?”
“I believe that was there,” said Holmes quietly, “However great Howell’s avarice, it was mixed with a very large dash of vanity. Hence the stories of having dived for treasure on a sunken galleon, having been sheikh of a Moroccan tribe, and indeed of being attaché at the Portuguese embassy in Rome. Perhaps he knew that his last moment had come and he certainly knew that those who had attended him would have found the ‘1847’ Sonnets in his pocket.”
“That would convict him of nothing.”
“There is a certain type, Mr Browning, whose greatest pleasure is in boasting of his tricks. He is like the murderer who taunts the police with ‘Catch me if you can.’ He puts his neck in the noose and snatches it out again.”
“And Howell?”
“‘Leaves of grass,’ which I can well believe were his last words, was not a reference to Mr Whitman but to the Sonnets. Esparto grass. The world had been tricked. But where was the fun unless, before he died, he could tell the world how cleverly it had been tricked?”
“He was not murdered after all?”
“His killer was far more likely to be a meek and merciless little microbe, thriving on the fermentation in his lungs, than the agent of a Neapolitan criminal gang. The story of underworld vengeance has too much of Gussie Howell about it to be believed.”
8
After that, Sherlock Holmes was not inclined to remain in Venice “to no purpose,” as he said. It was impossible to book a wagon-lit for the next day’s Grand European Express to Calais and London. On the following day we were more fortunate. By then the fate of Augustus Howell was beyond question. His death had been attended by such drama of his own making that they had held a coroner’s inquest on him. The report in the Continental edition of The Times reported a verdict of death from natural causes.
“How are the mighty fallen!” Holmes exclaimed as he closed the pages of the newspaper. “Poor Gussie Howell! To die of natural causes after all!”
It was the evening before our departure and we were sitting at a table outside Florian’s with the sunset casting fire across the outlines of basilica and palaces. We were waiting for Pen and Fannie Browning, whom Holmes had insisted should be our guests before we left for home.
“There is something amiss in their household which I cannot quite put my finger on, Watson. It is probably the incompatibility of Puritan principles and nude female models under the same roof. I sense that the young Brownings’ marriage is ‘but for a two months voyage victualled,’ as Shakespeare puts it. I would therefore prefer to meet on neutral ground.”
That evening, under the lamplight and the soft echoes of the wavelets by the canal steps, Holmes offered his final advice in response to questions from the youthful Pen Browning.
“You have a clear course before you now. You or your attorney must let it be known that whatever manuscripts are in the hands of auctioneers or vendors, purporting to be written by your parents, have been proved fraudulent. You may call me to witness if necessary. You must make it plain that those who dabble in such things are parties to a criminal fraud, carried out solely for the purposes of deception. That will put a stop to most dealings.”
“It may not stop publication.”
Holmes set his coffee cup down and looked thoughtful.
“Unfortunately the good old-fashioned remedy of taking a horsewhip to the scoundrel who publishes falsehood in this manner has been rather at a discount for some years. Now it must be a matter of threatening in advance to bring proceedings for libel against whom it might concern.”
“But surely,” said Pen Browning quickly, “it is no longer possible to libel the dead.”
Despite the difficulty which this presented, I saw that the young man was no end pleased in “putting one over” on the Great Detective. Holmes smiled at him indulgently.
“It is quite true that, at Cardiff Assizes in 1877, the excellent Mr Justice Stephen ruled that the dead have no remedy against civil libel since they are no longer juristic personalities. Criminal libel, however, that is to say defamation so offensive as to threaten a breach of the peace, is another matter and carries with it prison sentences long enough to deter all but the most resolute liars. There is your remedy.”
It was plain that young Mr Browning’s knowledge of English law stopped far short of this. He was chastened but grateful.
“Well then, Mr Holmes, there is only one more question. I must decide whether the letters of courtship between my parents should be published or burnt. About five years ago, my father burnt almost all his letters and manuscripts. He was in London at the time, in Warwick Crescent. He brought down an old travelling box of my grandfather’s and threw papers by the handful on to the fire in the front room. I saw the whole of his correspondence with Thomas Carlyle go up in flames.”
Holmes prompted him.
“And the letters written by your parents during their courtship?”
“He could not do it. He knew that he ought to destroy them but he could not. They were kept where they still lie, in an inlaid box. Not long before he died he gave this box to me and said, There they are. Do with them as you please when I am gone.’ But what am I to do?”
“When the time is right, you must publish them,” said Holmes at once. “Not now but in five or ten years. If they are anything like the two people who wrote them, they are noble and passionate, faithful and understanding, the exchanges of lovers who would die for one another. They must not perish, for there is too little of that sort of thing in the world. Publication will smash the forgers once and for all. Such creatures of darkness cannot endure the light of the sun.”
Pen Browning looked up, as if startled by this.
“I believe you are right,” he said firmly.
The letters were published nine years later and whatever fakes or forgeries may have lingered were extinguished by their beauty. Next day Holmes and I returned to England. He would accept no fee from Angelo Fiori on behalf of Pen Browning. Instead, he asked only for the “worthless” manuscripts of Don Juan in the New World, The Venetian Nun and Savonarola to the Signoria, with a set of the false “first editions,” including the 1847 Sonnets of “E. B. B.” They were given a place in what he called his “Cabinet of Curiosities.” By an irony of time, some of the books were to become more valuable than the genuine first editions which they had claimed to pre-date.
Yet Holmes knew the difference between true gold and fool’s gold. As the express left Venice, he opened a copy of Robert Browning’s “Roman Murder Story,” The Ring and the Book, which he had picked up from a bookstall at the last moment. It so absorbed him that he sat up all night reading and closed the last page of its twelfth book about ten minutes before our train p
ulled into Charing Cross.
IV
The Case of Peter the Painter
1
On a morning in early December, three years before the Great War, Mrs Hedges brought us the unusual story of a yellow canary. By this time of the year, the branches of the great elms and beeches were bare. Beyond Clarence Gate, on my morning walk, the avenues of the Regent’s Park echoed to the scuffling of pedestrians striding through drifts of dried leaves, as if they were wading through the shallows of a holiday beach.
When the rain began that morning, at ten minutes before ten o’clock, I had just returned to our rooms, stopping only at my tobacconist for two ounces of Navy Cut. Sherlock Holmes had still been at the breakfast table in his dressing gown when I set off. Now he was rigged out in a tweed suit with a belted Norfolk jacket. As I entered the sitting-room, he drew aside a corner of the Paddington Gazette and looked at me from his arm-chair.
“You had not forgotten, Watson, that the mysterious Mrs Hedges is to call upon us at ten-thirty precisely?”
“No,” I said, a little irritably, “I had not forgotten.”
I sat down at the table in the window and began to rub the moist tobacco leaves, crumbling them into my leather pouch.
Holmes and I had reached that stage of our history when the clatter of omnibus engines in the street below had begun to eclipse the more homely beat of hooves and the grinding wheels of the hansom cabs.
“Good,” said Holmes in a tone that irritated me somewhat more, “I am glad you had not forgotten. The romance of crime has grown stale of late, Watson. Villainy is at a discount. Let us hope that Mrs Hedges can bring a challenge into our too-sedentary existence.”
I thought that was most unlikely. Mrs Hedges had been recommended casually by John Jervis, the new young curate of St Alban’s Church, Marylebone, a stone’s throw from Baker Street. Mr Jervis with his scrubbed nails and shining face had presumed, on a very slight acquaintance, to send a note recommending the lady to our attention and suggesting that an appointment at ten-thirty on the morning in question might be convenient. He described her as a worthy woman who was in some difficulty over a matter concerning a yellow canary. And that was all. It scarcely sounded likely to restore to our lives the drama of major crime. In that, not for the first time, I was to be mistaken.
It was a measure of our present idleness that Holmes had welcomed the young curate’s suggestion.
“Depend upon it, Watson, there is nothing so indicative of true villainy as the commonplace. The song of a yellow canary is quite capable of heralding the arrival of gangsters of the most atrocious kind.”
He spoke more truly than even he could possibly have known. For the moment, I sat and rubbed tobacco while the sky darkened. Then the rain swept along Baker Street in a winter storm for half an hour. As suddenly as they had darkened, the heavens cleared again. A little before ten-thirty, Holmes got up and stood at the window, his tall spare figure veiled from the outside world by net curtains. He was gazing at a wooden bench outside the florist’s shop.
“It appears to be a characteristic of our working classes, Watson, that their greatest fear is not of murder or highway robbery but that they may be late for an appointment at which such things are to be discussed. Hence, they are always early. Unless I am mistaken, our visitor is already in attendance. See there.” He reached for his ivory-rimmed opera-glasses, which were kept on a bookshelf conveniently close to the window, and unbuttoned their case. “A worthy woman of the less fortunate class, as Mr Jervis promised. Do you not observe?”
I studied the figure sitting on that public bench. If this were she, Mrs Hedges was the type who is about forty-five years old but has been made by toil and deprivation to look more like fifty-five. Her dress of polka-dot cotton, her white blouse, boots and dark-blue straw hat secured by a pin of artificial pearl, spoke of thrift, hard-work and economy. She also wore a dark outdoor coat which had seen better, not to say more fashionable, days.
“Mr Jervis told us little enough,” said Holmes quietly, “but by the aid of strong glasses and at comparatively short range one may deduce a little more. Mr Jervis may hail from Marylebone but I fancy that the slums of Whitechapel or Stepney are this lady’s parish.”
I laughed at him.
“How can you tell?”
“Observe the sky. A glance at its movements suggests that the clouds and rain are moving eastwards at about five miles an hour. Our visitor has escaped the rain. Her coat you will see is quite dry. The umbrella she carries is not even unrolled. The welt of her boots is a little damp from walking in Baker Street where rain has already fallen. Yet there is no drop of water on the uppers nor even a mark where a drop has dried. Therefore she did not arrive in Baker Street until after the rain stopped ten minutes ago. She evidently came by omnibus as a matter of economy, since we have heard no sound of a cab drawing up. Moreover, it cannot have been raining at the point where she boarded the bus for her journey, shall we say forty minutes ago? That would put her just clear of the oncoming rain from the west. Let us say she was some three and a half miles to the east or south-east of us. I believe that would place her at Whitechapel or possibly Stepney. Had she come from the west she would have been rained upon, probably twice.”
“And what if she came by the underground railway?”
“I think not. That journey would have been quicker, which means she would have caught the rain at one end of it or the other.”
We drew back from the window. At half-past ten to the minute, there was a knock at the sitting-room door. Our landlady Mrs Hudson announced Mrs Hedges. Sherlock Holmes was on his feet at once. In a couple of strides he was shaking our visitor’s hand and simultaneously gesturing her to a buttoned lady-chair which was now at one side of the fireplace.
“Mrs Hedges! How good of you to come all the way from Stepney to see us. My name is Sherlock Holmes and this is my friend and colleague, Dr John Watson, before whom you may speak as freely as to myself.”
For all his bonhomie, she was a nervous type.
“I hope, sir,” she said quietly, “it’s no inconvenience. It was Whitechapel, rather than Stepney, to tell the truth.”
Holmes glanced at me with a look of reproach, which said on behalf of Whitechapel, “Oh ye of little faith.” Then he spread out his hands, gallantly dismissing any suggestion that her arrival might be an imposition.
“Pray be assured, Mrs Hedges, that no service we can do you will be an inconvenience.”
“Not Whitechapel, precisely,” she continued awkwardly, “Houndsditch, more like. Perhaps I should tell you a little....”
Holmes gave her a nod of reassurance and another deprecating gesture. My heart sank, for I felt he might be in the mood for sport.
“Let me see if I can deduce a little, Mrs Hedges. That is, after all, the profession of a criminal investigator. You have come from Houndsditch and that is all we know, beyond the fact that you were evidently a seamstress until you retired from that occupation because, as is sadly so often the case with sewing, you suffered a loss in your near-sight. You are plainly left-handed and you have a little girl who has lately suffered an infectious disease. She is not at present attending school. The poor little mite is a nervous child and apt to be lonely.”
“You could not know so much, Mr Holmes, sir! Not even Mr Jervis knows about my little girl. Though, to tell the truth, it’s the canary that began it.”
Holmes paused, then laughed gently at the unease in her face.
“There is no black magic here, my dear Mrs Hedges. A certain quickness in the movements of your fingers, a fine mark imprinted on the left forefinger and thumb, a fuller development of the left-hand musculature would suggest something more than fireside stitching. You do not wear spectacles just now, so it seems evident that you do not require them all the time. Yet there are the marks at the bridge of your nose to indicate that you require glasses for close work. Were you still systematically engaged in it, the marks would be more definitive. Therefore you ha
ve retired from an occupation which, in anything but the best light, damages the near sight.”
He could be as charming sometimes as he could be misanthropic at others, usually more charming with a poor seamstress than with a peer of the realm or a captain of finance. With his guessing game, he had certainly charmed Mrs Hedges. Now that everything had been explained she relaxed—and even smiled. Holmes smiled back at her and continued with the same reassurance. The game had been played to good purpose.
“After all, Mrs Hedges, I deduced nothing about the yellow canary. As to your little girl, there are still two fair hairs adhering to the darker wool of your outdoor coat. You would hardly see them where they are. They are shorter than your own and of a lighter hue. They have adhered to the material a little above waist-height. That is where they would have attached themselves had they been brushed from the head of a child who is some twelve inches shorter than you. Or had she clung to you very determinedly just before you left her. That suggests you have been obliged through circumstances to leave her on her own.”
Mrs Hedges shook her head in admiration, pleased now but wondering. Holmes continued.
“The two strands of hair are on your outdoor coat. This indicates that you brushed her hair shortly before leaving home. By then it was much too late for her to go to school today. Yet the Education Act would require her attendance there, except in the case of a communicable or other disease. I could be more elaborate but I really think we must proceed to business.”
Again Mrs Hedges relaxed a little.
“Louisa,” she said at last, “Our Louisa is just gone eight years old. Whooping-cough was what she had. They won’t have her back until the doctor signs a certificate.”
Holmes touched his fingertips together and became the listener.
“And what is it that troubles you?”
Our visitor looked at him doubtfully.
“The foreigners, Mr Holmes. They moved in at the back four weeks ago.”
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