by Marvin Kaye
“We’re looking into it,” the officer said. For the first time I was aware that we were tilting forward, and I remembered the liquid in my glass. From far off came the sudden sound of a lively ragtime tune being played by the orchestra.
Franklin Baynes, the spiritualist, was coming down the stairs from the boat deck. “What’s going on?” he asked. “The crew is uncovering the lifeboats.”
Captain Smith himself appeared on the stairs in time to hear the question. “It’s just a precaution,” he told them. “The ship is taking on water.”
“From that iceberg?” Futrelle asked.
“Yes. Please gather your families and follow directions to your lifeboat stations.”
Margo Collier seemed dazed. “This ship is unsinkable! There are waterproof compartments. I read all the literature.”
“Please follow instructions,” the Captain said, a bit more sharply. “Leave that body where it is.”
“I must get to May,” Futrelle said. I hurried after him. There would be time for the rest later.
Within minutes we were on the deck with May. She was clinging to her husband, unwilling to let go. “Aren’t there enough lifeboats for everyone?” she asked. The answer was already plain. The Titanic was sinking and there was room enough for only half the passengers in the lifeboats. It was 12:25 A.M. when the order came for women and children to abandon ship. We had scraped against the iceberg only forty-five minutes earlier.
“Jacques!” May Futrelle screamed, and he pushed her to safety in the nearest lifeboat.
“Now what?” he asked me, as the half-full lifeboat was being lowered to the dark churning waters. “Do we go back for our murderer?”
“So you spotted it too?” I asked, already leading the way.
“The missing cane. I only saw Glacet once but he walked with the aid of a stout walking stick.”
“Exactly,” I agreed. “And I’m told he used it regularly. It wasn’t on top of the elevator car and it hadn’t slipped down to the bottom of the shaft. That meant he didn’t step into that empty shaft accidentally. He had help.” We were on the Grand Staircase now, and I spotted our quarry. “Didn’t he, Mr. Baynes?”
He turned at the sound of his name, and drew a revolver from under his coat. “Damn you, Holmes! You’ll go down with the ship.”
“We all will, Baynes. The women and children are leaving. The rest of us will stay. Glacet recognized you as a confidence man he’d once pursued, a man named Sanbey—a simple anagram for Baynes. Somehow you got him into your cabin tonight to stare at your electric crystal ball. When the bright light had temporarily blinded him, you helped him to the elevator, then sent the car down and pushed him after it. Only you forgot his walking stick. That probably went over the side when you discovered it.”
The great ship listed suddenly, throwing us against the staircase railing. “I’m getting out of here, Holmes! I’ll find room in a lifeboat if I have to don women’s clothes!” He raised the revolver and fired.
And in that instant, before I could move, Futrelle jumped between us. He took the bullet meant for me and collided with Baynes, sending them both over the railing of the Grand Staircase.
Somehow I made my way into the night air. It was just after one o’clock and the orchestra had moved to the boat deck to continue playing. The remaining passengers were beginning to panic. Suddenly someone grabbed me and shoved me toward a lifeboat. “Only twelve aboard starboard number one, sir. Plenty of room for you.”
“I’ll stay,” I said, but it was not to be. I was pushed bodily into the boat as it was being lowered.
It was from there, an hour later, that I saw the last of the great Titanic vanish beneath the waves, carrying a victim, a murderer, and a mystery writer with it. Two hours after that a ship called the Carpathia plucked us from the water, amidst floating ice and debris. Margo Collier was among the survivors, but I never saw her again.
A final note by Dr. Watson: It was not until 1918, at the close of the Great War, that my old friend Holmes entrusted this account to my care. By that time, my literary agent, Arthur Conan Doyle, had embraced spiritualism. He refused to handle a story in which a spiritualist was revealed to be a sham and a murderer. This most dramatic of adventures has remained unpublished.
Imagine Sherlock Holmes consulted by a client so appalling that the detective would never want word to get out that he’d actually helped him. Now imagine who that client might possibly be. If the answer hasn’t immediately occurred to you, then read “The Revenge of the Fenian Brotherhood,” a riveting adventure that took place approximately eighteen months before the dire events recounted in Watson’s famous tale, “The Final Problem.”
The Revenge of the Fenian Brotherhood
BY CAROLE BUGGÉ
We have received many unusual visitors in our rooms on the second floor of 221 Baker Street, but I cannot remember any appearance more unexpected than that of the personage who appeared at our door on a cold, wet November night in 1889. I was, in fact, left speechless for some time—though Holmes, displaying his usual sang-froid, calmly motioned our visitor towards the sofa.
“You realize, of course, my distaste in coming to you for assistance in this matter,” said our caller, settling his thin, bony frame into the depths of the sofa.
“Naturally,” Holmes replied, digging his long fingers into the Persian slipper which served as his tobacco tin.
I stood staring as foolishly as a schoolboy, until Holmes laid a hand gently on my shoulder.
“Please sit down, Watson; you are making me nervous.”
I sat slowly in my usual chair in front of the crackling fire, never taking my eyes off our guest. I don’t know what I thought he would do, but although I had never laid eyes on him before I was certain that this was a man you did not turn your back on.
Holmes was more sanguine, however, and deliberately turned his back to procure a match from the mantelpiece. At this our visitor chuckled.
“Always the showman, eh, Holmes?” he said in a low voice, hissing his s’s, his grey eyes as hooded as a viper’s. He turned his steely gaze on me, and it was then I first made eye contact with the late Professor James Moriarty.
“No more than yourself,” Holmes replied, lighting his pipe and turning to face the Professor.
“Now it is you who are making me nervous, Holmes—sit down, please,” I said, my eyes still trained on Moriarty; some instinct deep within me would not let me take my gaze off him. I had always thought of him as the personification of evil, and yet now what struck me about his face was how deeply pain was etched into every line, every crevice—as though someone had taken a sharp knife and carved out a mask of suffering. His eyes were dead, though, as cold and lifeless as the lidless eyes of a fish.
Holmes sat in the winged armchair opposite mine. “Now, then, Professor, what can I do for you?”
Moriarty gave off a long, slow exhalation of breath, which made a low hissing sound like air escaping from a tyre. There was a long pause as he rose and walked to the window, pulling aside the curtains to look out on the street below. I tensed in my chair, ready to spring, my mind racing—it occurred to me that he might be giving a signal of some kind. I glanced at Holmes, who appeared utterly unconcerned; he sat smoking peacefully, his eyes half closed, fingers folded in repose on his lap.
Finally Moriarty spoke.
“What a pitiful sight mankind is,” he said, still gazing out onto the street, “hurrying back and forth like so many ants, and all to what purpose? To work and spawn and die, with no more mind-fulness than a doomed salmon swimming upstream towards his death.”
“You certainly did not come here to philosophize with me,” said Holmes. “May I ask—”
“You are unaware, perhaps, that I have a brother?” Moriarty interrupted, swivelling to face us, and again I was struck by the pain which had hardened into the lines of his face.
“I had heard something of it,” Holmes replied, “from my own brother.”
“Ah, yes,
Mycroft,” Moriarty said, his thin lips curling into something resembling a smile.
“I believe he lives in Ireland, does he not?”
Again Moriarty sighed, but when he spoke his voice was a sneer. “If anyone could be said to actually ‘live’ in Ireland. He is, in fact, a Catholic priest.”
If Holmes felt any surprise at this revelation he betrayed none of it. Moriarty, however, snickered. “Yes, it is ironic, isn’t it? A brother who is a man of the cloth—when I have devoted myself to quite another kind of priesthood.”
“He is in trouble, your brother?”
Moriarty nodded, his large head swivelling precariously on its long, thin neck; it was as though the head of a bull had been set upon the body of a giraffe.
“We had a—falling out, shall we say—and have not spoken for some years, and yet, when I came by the information that I am about to tell you I had no choice but to intervene.”
“No choice—?”
Moriarty smiled, and though I would not say it was a warm smile, some of the hard lines on his face softened. “It may surprise you to know that even I have areas in my life which are—sacred, so to speak.”
“Not at all,” Holmes replied. “I would have assumed as much.”
“I am afraid that it is so unoriginal as to be a cliché, but I made a promise to my dying mother that no matter what came, I would look after my younger brother, Sean. And I have kept that promise—until now, that is.”
“I see; pray continue.”
Moriarty walked back to sit upon the couch again; his gait swayed like that of a large flightless bird.
“You have perhaps heard of the Fenian Brotherhood?”
“I have heard of them, yes—they are essentially a terrorist organization bent on the eradication of British rule in Ireland. Is your brother mixed up with them?”
“On the contrary; he is their sworn enemy. I have reason to believe they have kidnapped him.”
“I see.” Holmes’s face was as stoic as ever, but he could not conceal the gleam of interest in his grey eyes, which burned dark as coals in the dull November light.
“So you see your involvement in this case would be for the good of England as well. If you don’t believe me, ask your brother Mycroft; he is privy to every bit of international intelligence, is he not?”
Holmes just smiled in reply. “Why do you come to me for assistance when you have a network of your own upon which to draw?”
Moriarty’s face hardened again, and his dark eyes clouded over. “Because my brother must know nothing of my involvement in his rescue. He knows my agents, and he knows the way I operate. He has taken great pains to disassociate himself from me—”
“And yet you protect him,” I blurted out.
“As I said, Dr. Watson, every man has some things that are sacred.”
“Say no more,” Holmes said graciously; “I see your predicament. Do you know whether Scotland Yard has been informed of this matter yet?”
Moriarty let out what could have been taken for a laugh—a short, brutal exhalation of air. “If they have, they have not learned it from me.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you know?”
“There isn’t much to tell. My brother was invited to preach at a notoriously pro-Fenian church here in London, and his subject matter did not sit well with certain factions in the congregation . . . The next day he went out in the morning and did not return.”
“I see. Naturally you suspect elements of that organization.”
“Let’s just say there’s a strong certainty, Holmes.” Moriarty’s eyes narrowed and darkened. “It’s well for them that I am not handling this myself . . . I would make them pay in ways you cannot imagine,” he said in a cold, flat voice.
I shuddered at not so much his words as the way he said them.
Holmes rose from his chair. “I will begin working on it immediately.”
Moriarty rose stiffly and walked to the door in his peculiar, swaying gait. When he reached the door he paused.
“You realize, of course, that this changes nothing between us?”
Holmes smiled. “Of course.”
Their eyes met briefly and they exchanged a look extraordinary in its contradictions—it was full of understanding without friendship, admiration without affection; the sort of look two opposing generals might give one another on the eve of battle. Without another word Moriarty turned and was gone. I listened as his footsteps descended the stairs, and only when I heard the front door latch behind him did I turn to Holmes.
“I didn’t know he had a brother.”
Holmes shrugged. “Neither did I.”
“But you said—”
“My dear Watson, with a man like Moriarty it is better not to admit ignorance on any matter if you can avoid it.”
“But how did you know he lived in Ireland?”
“That was a lucky guess; Moriarty is an Irish name.”
“But what if this whole thing is a trap?”
“I think we can rule that out easily enough,” he replied, opening the door to the sitting room. To my surprise, our landlady, Mrs. Hudson, was standing in the hallway outside. She wore an apron and there was flour on her hands.
“Yes, Mrs. Hudson?” said Holmes with a smile.
“I just thought I’d come up and see . . . if everything was all right—that is . . .” she said, flustered.
“Quite all right, thank you,” Holmes replied, scribbling something on a piece of paper. “Would you see that Master Tuthill of the Baker Street Irregulars gets this?” he said, handing the note to Mrs. Hudson.
“Yes, sir,” she answered, tucking it into the pocket of her apron. “Mr. Holmes, may I ask you something? That fellow who was just here . . . he—what I mean is, was he—?”
“Yes, Mrs. Hudson, he was. And now don’t let us detain you any longer; please return to your baking.”
“What—? Oh, yes,” she said, looking at her flour-covered hands. “Yes, of course . . .”
“Good-bye, Mrs. Hudson, and thank you,” Holmes said firmly.
“You’re welcome, Mr. Holmes; quite welcome, I’m sure.” She looked as if she wanted to say something else, but Holmes escorted her gently to the door and closed it behind her.
“The less she knows about this the better for her,” he said, heading for his bedroom.
“He’s telling the truth, you think, then?”
“We shall find out soon enough. It’s time for a visit to Brother Mycroft.”
The Diogenes Club was in Pall Mall, across from Mycroft’s rooms, and a short distance from his office. His routine rarely varied; he could be found in his office until precisely four forty-five, at which time he made his way to his club, then at exactly seven-forty trundled off to his lodgings. It is ironic that the physical universe inhabited by this extraordinary creature was as limited as his mental world was expansive. Holmes had once confided to me that Mycroft was not only his intellectual superior, but that “one might even say that Mycroft is the Government.” Holmes was not a man given to exaggeration, and so my respect for his brother Mycroft was considerable.
We entered the august edifice which housed the club, a heavy grey stone building typical of the mid-Victorian period, and headed straight for the Visitors’ Lounge, the only room in the cavernous structure in which conversation was allowed. Mycroft Holmes was seated in an armchair, and I thought he had grown a tad heftier since our last encounter. His grey eyes were as keen as his brother’s, however, and his massive skull was evidence of the same magnificent brain power. I sat—or rather sank—down upon a low overstuffed armchair.
“You are dealing with an offshoot of the Fenians called the Triangle,” he said, without any conversational preamble. “They call themselves The Invincibles, or Clann na Gael. Some of their darker deeds include the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish, shortly after he was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, in 1882; they are also suspected of crimes in the United States. They are ruthless and will stop at nothing
to achieve their goal of Irish independence.”
He paused and lit the pipe which sat on the arm of his chair, and thin reeds of smoke curled around his broad head.
“The Government has already received a ransom note in the matter of Moriarty’s brother, offering to exchange him for Fenian prisoners. An exchange is of course out of the question. The men we hold are directly implicated in the dynamite campaign of 1883, in which a number of bombs were set off all over England, some of which killed innocent people.
“One more thing,” said Mycroft; “we have reason to believe that a bomb will be planted in a major edifice somewhere in London within the next few days. I needn’t tell you that the consequences could be catastrophic.” He handed Holmes a piece of paper. “These password phrases may or may not work; however, it is the most current information we have.”
“I see,” said Holmes. He studied the paper, his lean face tight, his grey eyes gleaming like coals in the dim light of the Diogenes Club.
Mycroft walked us to the door, and as we turned to leave, he laid a hand on his brother’s shoulder.
“Be careful, Sherlock.”
I was struck more by the uncharacteristic gesture than by his words, but Holmes just nodded.
Outside, we stood for a moment watching a dimly glimmering twilight settle over London. Holmes stood upon the stairs, his sharp profile silhouetted against the waning light in the western sky. I wondered what thoughts were racing through that quicksilver brain when suddenly he shook off his mood, sprang into the street, and hailed a cab. The cab ride back to Baker Street was spent in silence; Holmes sat in the corner wrapped in thought, and I knew better than to disturb him at times like this.
When we arrived at Baker Street, Holmes went straight to his bedroom without a word. I sat down on the couch and filled my pipe. I didn’t like this, any of it, but I was so accustomed to deferring to Holmes in most matters that I didn’t know if I should say anything. My concern turned to astonishment a few minutes later when Holmes emerged from the bedroom dressed in a black suit and clerical collar.