by David Marcum
“Well, I for one cannot say that it is likely to weigh very heavily upon my conscience. Dr. Purcell literally took upon himself the role of Atropos.”[50]
“Atropos?” I asked.
“I learned of her when reading about the effects of atropine in the first volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica.[51] She is the eldest of the Three Fates. It is her abhorred shears that ends the lives of us mortals.”
“And have we overstepped our roles, Holmes? Are we not acting as judge, jury, and executioner?”[52]
“Not at all, Watson. We merely offered him the choice. It is up to him whether he meets his destiny in his own bed, or at the end of a hangman’s noose.”
After a moment, I nodded. “Then let us hope he chooses wisely.”
“Indeed. Do you have any other thoughts upon the matter, Watson?”
“You know, Holmes. I never really thought it was the plague.”
“And why is that?” he asked, clearly puzzled that he may have missed some clue.
“Because there was no comet to herald its coming.”
Holmes smiled grimly and shook his head. “Good old Watson. Come, we have waited long enough. Let us learn the decision of Dr. Purcell.”
It was a singular scene which met our eyes when we re-entered the bedroom. On the table lay the bottle, its cap off and the contents emptied. Beside the table, upon the wooden chair, sat Dr. Edward Purcell, his cravat loosened. His chin was slumped upon his breast, and his eyes were fixed with a horrible vacant stare at the floor. His tongue protruded slightly from his mouth, and it was still stained that deep black color. He made neither sound nor motion, and had surely passed beyond the veil to the bourn of that undiscovered country.[53]
Such are the true particulars of the death of Dr. Edward Purcell of Charing Cross Hospital. It is not necessary to prolong this narrative in order to tell of how Holmes broke the news to Sir James Saunders. Suffice it to say that Holmes spared Mrs. Purcell the public ignominy of having been wed to a murderer, and Sir James thanked Holmes warmly for his professional service. The official verdict, as carefully directed by my friend, came to show that the Doctor had met his doom at the hands of a brief but terrible outbreak of the Black Plague, which fortuitously burned itself out after the death of that once-renowned specialist.
When we had finally settled back at Baker Street, my friend sighed heavily and shook his head while gazing at the fire. “As I have said before, when a doctor goes wrong, he is the first of criminals. The ways of destiny are difficult to comprehend, Watson. Is the world nothing more than some ugly beast against which we must wage eternal battle?”
“Perhaps the madness exists so that you have something to combat?”
Holmes glanced at me and laughed. “I never get your limits, Watson. Very well then, I suppose that we shall embrace the madness. By the way, Watson, I have a small gift for you.” He reached into his coat pocket and extracted a small book, which he proceeded to hand over to me.
I was greatly surprised by this unexpected act from a man whose paucity of expressed sentiment led so many to regard him as a little more than a cerebral automaton.[54] “I believe this is a first, Holmes.” I studied the volume, which proved to be a compact edition Boccaccio’s Decameron. Flipping it open, I found the name of Joseph Stangerson upon the fly-leaf, and smiled broadly at the recollection of our initial adventure together.[55]
“Have you read it?” he inquired.
“When I was a school-boy. It’s been over twenty years.”
“And do you still remember the premise?”
“A group of young aristocrats of Florence tell a hundred ribald stories, if memory serves. A sort of Italianate Canterbury Tales, is it not?”[56]
“Ah, but there were not in Florence, were they, Watson? They had fled to a villa in the hills in order to escape the Black Death. I found Boccaccio’s description of it quite illuminating: ‘The form of the malady... black spots or livid making their appearance in many cases on the arm or the thigh or elsewhere, now few and large, now minute and numerous.’ If I recall correctly, Watson, you on one occasion, in the very early days of our association, demarcated the limits of my knowledge in a detailed list.”
“Your memory is precise, as usual, Holmes,” said I, chuckling.
“At the very top of that list you rated my knowledge of literature as ‘nil.’”
“Well, until you quoted Boccaccio at me just now, I would have sworn that was still the case.”
“Indeed, for during my training I could see no purpose to cluttering my little brain attic with words written centuries ago, save only when they were a description of crimes, of course. But you see, Watson, if I had but read Boccaccio earlier, I would have realized much sooner that Dr. Purcell’s supposed plague was a fraud. The blackness was all wrong. His patients’ tongues may have been black, but they had no spots upon their skin, for he could find no method to simulate them. If I had not limited myself, Mr. Garrett might still be alive, and Mrs. Purcell would not have come within minutes of her death, saved only by our fortuitous arrival,” he concluded, solemnly.
“You cannot blame yourself, Holmes. You are but a man. You cannot know everything.”
“But why not, Watson?” he shook his head, grimly. “That is my profession after all. To know things. There is no reason I should not add to my mental resources, for who can tell when some rare smidgen of knowledge might mean the difference between life and death. It is possible, Watson, that I have made a mistake. But it is perhaps better to learn wisdom late, than to never learn it at all. I therefore promise you that this is a deficiency which I plan to rectify straightaway.”[57]
It was then that I understood that the pocket-edition of Boccaccio was not Holmes’s gift. The gift was, in fact, a brief glimpse into the all-too-human soul which lurked, carefully hidden, behind the façade of that cool reasoning machine.
1 This is clearly a reference to the events recorded in “The Man with the Twisted Lip”.
2 Certainly, this denotes Irene Adler and “A Scandal in Bohemia”.
3 This problem sounds similar to the cases of both James Phillimore (“The Problem of Thor Bridge”), but also Louis Le Prince, a French motion picture pioneer who boarded the Dion-Paris Express on 16 September 1890, and mysteriously vanished. His case is still unsolved.
4 Hatton Garden is a street in the Holborn district of London which has been London’s jewelry quarter since medieval times.
5 The famous line of Iago, from Shakespeare’s Othello (Act 1, Scene 1).
6 Many years later it is Holmes who enlists the aid of Sir James Saunders in “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier”.
7 Charing Cross Hospital is where Dr. James Mortimer trained (The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter 2) and is where Holmes is taken after he is beaten by thugs in the employ of Baron Gruner (“The Adventure of the Illustrious Client”).
8 Cavendish Square is the historic home of London’s medical specialists, where Dr. Percy Trevelyan hoped to one day have his practice (“The Adventure of the Resident Patient”), while a red lamp is the usual sign of the general practitioner, such as Dr. Barnicot (“The Adventure of the Six Napoleons”).
9 Fleet Street was the traditional home of the British national newspapers until the 1980’s, and as such it is a metonym for the British press.
10 In 1889, the exact cause of the plague was not yet known. Five years later, Alexandre Yersin of France was credited as the primary discoverer of the bacterium that eventually became known as Yersinia pestis.
11 The Great Plague of London (1665-1666) and was the last major plague epidemic in England. It has been hypothesized that the coincidental Great Fire of London (1666) was responsible for putting an end to the epidemic, as the rebuilding of London did away with m
any of the previous conditions that fostered the spread of the plague.
12 Comets have long been considered heralds of doom and omens of world-altering change.
13 This was fifteen percent of the population of London.
14 The Black Death pandemic hit southern England in 1349.
15 The London Necropolis Railway opened in 1854 to transport cadavers and mourners between the Necropolis Railway Station in London (near Waterloo Station; this was destroyed in an air raid during World War II) and Brookwood Cemetery (built to replace central London’s squalid and overcrowded historic cemeteries).
16 Cremation was not legal in Great Britain until 1885, but the practice took a long time to catch on. In all of 1888, only 28 cremations took place in the UK, though the number increased greatly after this method was chosen in 1905 by the famous Shakespearean actor Sir Henry Irving, whose company manager was Bram Stoker, and who staged the play Waterloo in 1894 for Arthur Conan Doyle.
17 The incubation period of bubonic plague is two to five days, with the septicemic form being even shorter.
18 Sir Joseph Bazalgette (1819-1891) was the chief engineer of London’s Metropolitan Board of Works who, in response to the Great Stink of 1858, set out to create the sewer network that resulted in the cleansing of the Thames and relief from recurrent cholera epidemics.
19 The connection of rats to the plague has long been recognized, for whenever large numbers of rats were found dead, an outbreak was sure to follow. However, the link to the rat’s fleas was a more modern discovery. Of note, only one other unrecorded story details Holmes and Watson dealing with rodents: The giant rat of Sumatra (“The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”).
20 A clowder is one of the accepted terms for a group of cats.
21 The tail-less Manx cats from the Isle of Man are prized as hunters, and a strong preference for them as ship’s cats is thought to be responsible for the world-wide spread of what originated as a very insular breed.
22 Classic rat-catchers were still active into the early 1900’s in many parts of the world. The most famous was an eccentric character named Jack Black, appointed Her Majesty’s Ratcatcher.
23 A “coolie” was a cheap and unskilled laborer from Asia. They congregated in the London docklands, where they were feared to be spreading disease. Holmes blamed them for his fictitious Sumatran fever (“The Adventure of the Dying Detective”).
24 The Black Death ravaged much of the Islamic world until at least 1850. The Third plague pandemic (1855–1859) started in China, and eventually spreading to all inhabited continents. It killed 10 million people in India alone. Even in “civilized” North America, the plague struck San Francisco in 1900-1904, followed by another outbreak in 1907-1908.
25 Americans would call these “seizures”.
26 Also known as tuberculosis.
27 Dropsy is an archaic term for edema, principally of the feet, and most often caused by congestive heart failure.
28 Where Watson also got his degree (A Study in Scarlet, Chapter 1).
29 Sydenham’s Chorea (historically known as St. Vitus’ dance) was a disorder characterized by rapid jerking movements of the face and hands, and was a common sequelae of Streptococcal infections in the pre-penicillin era.
30 Watson condemned Holmes’s excessive tobacco consumption in both “The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips” and “The Devil’s Foot”.
31 Jacko was a black and tan Bull Terrier that set the world record in 1862 for the time it took him to kill a pack of sixty rats. The sport of ratting was not formally banned in England until 1912.
32 Watson also noted the presence of these refuges in “The Adventure of Black Peter”.
33 This is true, but clearly unknown to Holmes or Watson was that only black rats are potential carriers of the plague, another possible reason why it has largely died out over time.
34 William (c.1287-1347) of Ockham (or Occam) was an English medieval philosopher whose maxim on the law of parsimony states that “entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” This “Razor” competes for fame with the maxim of a later Englishman: “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
35 Indeed it was soon to be. Waldemar Haffkine, a doctor working in Bombay, India, was the first to invent and test a vaccine against the plague in 1897.
36 Four Thieves Vinegar was a legendary ward against the Black Death. One recipe from Marseille states: “Take three pints of strong white wine vinegar, add a handful of each of wormwood, meadowsweet, wild marjoram and sage, fifty cloves, two ounces of campanula roots, two ounces of angelic, rosemary and horehound and three large measures of camphor. Place the mixture in a container for fifteen days, strain and express, then bottle. Use by rubbing it on the hands, ears and temples from time to time when approaching a plague victim.”
37 Henry Purcell (1659-1695) was considered the premier English-born composer until the late 1800’s, when he was supplanted by Edward Elgar (1857-1934), and later Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958).
38 Holmes was not feigning his interest in the opera. In the Canon he can be seen attending it at the end of both “The Adventure of the Red Circle” and The Hound of the Baskervilles (Chapter 15).
39 “Lascar” is a now archaic term indicating non-white (typically Indian) sailors aboard British ships. The most famous Lascar was the confederate of the beggar Hugh Boone (“The Man with the Twisted Lip”).
40 Unfortunately, a more complete account of the Chadwick murder, and how exactly the temperature of her tea played a role, has yet to be discovered.
41 It was not until 1896 that the rat flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, was identified as the vector of Yersinia pestis from rats to humans, so at the time, Dr. Purcell’s theory would not be implausible. In fact, the North African sand fly is capable of transmitting a terrible disease, leishmaniasis, also known as kala-azar or dum-dum fever, which remained a major problem until the advent of the antibiotic era in the 1950’s.
42 Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) was the greatest Norwegian composer. His Sonata No.3 was written in 1887. Holmes’s familiarity with it may have influenced his later choice to adopt the guise of the Norwegian explorer Sigerson (“The Adventure of the Empty House”).
43 Known to Western medicine since the root was brought back from Brazil in the 1600’s, but no longer on the market, for many decades it was recommended that ipecac be kept in every house in case of accidental poisoning.
44 As noted in A Study in Scarlet (Chapter 1).
45 Bismuth salts have been used as an antidiarrheal agent since the 1700’s, but were not sold directly to consumers until 1901. The black-colored salts can have the unintended side-effect of turning the tongue and stool black.
46 The flux is an archaic term for dysentery, itself a catch-all term for various severe intestinal infections caused by bacteria, parasites, or viruses. Dysentery was historically a great killer, taking the lives of such famous individuals as King John Lackland (1216), King Henry V (1422), and Sir Francis Drake (1596).
47 Holmes himself was familiar with the use of belladonna, which he used to dilate his pupils in “The Adventure of the Dying Detective”. Atropine was isolated in 1831, but knowledge of the effects of the various plants from which it may be derived is ancient. In addition to Atropa belladonna, mandrake and henbane can also produce the typical symptoms, which may be remembered as “hot as a hare (or Hades), dry as a bone, red as a beet, mad as a hatter.”
48 The Royal Philharmonic Society moved to St. James’s Hall on Great Portland Street in 1869, where it remained until 1894, when t
hey moved to the Queen’s Hall. The Hall was a neo-Gothic masterpiece, whose cavernous interior imitated the Moorish palace of the Alhambra. Holmes also heard both Norman-Neruda (A Study in Scarlet, Chapter 4) and Sarasate (“The Red-Headed League”) play there. Dickens gave his last public reading there shortly before his death in 1870. In 1902, St. James’s Hall was bought by the owner of a rival concert hall, who had it demolished in 1905.
49 Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) was a great favorite of English audiences of the 1880’s, where he was considered the greatest living French composer. In 1874, he wrote his Danse Macabre, his take on the medieval allegory on the universality of death, which originally arose out of the terrible horrors of the Black Death.
50 Atropos one of the three Moirai, or Fates. She was known as the inevitable, for she cut the thread (woven by Clotho and measured by Lachesis) with her abhorred shears.
51 The first volume of the Encyclopedia also played a significant role in the false employment of Mr. Jabez Wilson (“The Red-Headed League”).
52 Holmes often took matters into his own hands when he thought he could serve the spirit of justice more readily than a British jury. Some of the most famous examples include his pardoning of James Ryder (“The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”), Captain Croker (“The Adventure of the Abbey Grange”), and Dr. Sterndale (“The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot”).