Secret Letters

by Leah Scheier

  I paused briefly and gazed out over the darkening hilltop. There was just the ending of the story left, and I did not want to tell it. But I knew I could not end at half a truth. I had to tell him about my mother—and about my guilt.

  “A few days after my father’s death,” I continued sadly, “my mother also became ill. They said that she had caught his fever. Her illness lasted a little longer than his—so she had time—Before she died, she wrote me a letter in which she confessed the truth. She told me that she believed my real father is—he was—that my real father was—”

  I could not finish it. Why could I suddenly not speak his name? I had built my life around the man. Why could I not just say it, then?

  “I know, Dora.” He said the words so quietly that at first I did not hear him.

  “I’m glad you do,” I breathed and finally met his eyes. And now there was no longer any reason to turn away, for I had reached the most difficult portion of the story. His expression was rapt, intent; I could not read disapproval in his look. “I was not supposed to read the letter, Peter. She had addressed it to me, but she never actually gave it to me. Perhaps she changed her mind at the last moment, or perhaps she only intended for me to see it if she died. But she had not shut the drawer properly, and I noticed it as I sat beside her bed. That evening I stole it from her night table and read it while she slept. And it changed everything for me. Suddenly it seemed to me that every moment of our lives together had been false. And I had lost the one man whom I loved by someone else’s wrong, because of a lie which I could not change. I was so angry then, so full of hate. I burst into her room and wailed at her. I told her that she had robbed me and my father, that I was cursed because of her.”

  I paused here for a minute, waiting for his response. But he stayed silent, as he had promised me he would. “I told her that I would die before I called her ‘Mother,’” I finished miserably. “And I will have to, because she died after I left the room, early the next morning. Somehow, in that moment, in that one horrific moment, I managed to destroy a childhood of memories. You wanted to know why I came to London? I came because I wanted to give meaning to the lie behind my birth. I needed someone to make sense of it for me. I wanted to stop regretting my own history, wanted to stop being ashamed of who I was. I needed to belong somewhere.”

  “You were looking for a calling?”

  “I suppose. But mostly—I just didn’t want to disappoint again.”

  He shook his head and frowned. “I don’t know how to tell you this—”

  “I know what you are going to say,” I put in hastily. “You’re going to tell me that I need to forgive myself, that it’s all buried in the past. I don’t want to hear that.”

  “That’s good. Because that is not what I was going to say. I was going to say that I don’t think you would have found what you were seeking. Do you remember when I hinted that you’ve been waiting for a figment of your imagination? My friend, I think you would have come away disappointed, not the other way around.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He seemed to consider for a moment before replying. “Mr. Holmes was the man you’ve read about: truly brilliant, energetic, generous. But, Dora, he loved his solitude and independence more than anything—more than anyone. He would have been kind to you, no doubt, but your visit would have been very, very short. In the end, you might even have regretted coming up to meet him.”

  “Oh—I don’t want to believe that. I think I would rather have listened to the speech about leaving the past behind.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “Well, I’m sorry, but I’m hardly the person to lecture you about that. And as for forgiving yourself—Dora, you were not responsible for your family’s pain—you were not the cause of it—”

  His voice had faltered slightly toward the end, but now he stopped completely and slumped back against the bench. I stared at him and thought about his final words. He was no longer talking about me, I was sure of that. He was not even looking in my direction. His last statement had been a private self-reproach, his own bitter hint of guilt.

  Was I supposed to ask him what he meant? I had already trod over his privacy; I did not want to pry again. And yet he seemed now to be waiting for me—

  And then he answered me before I spoke.

  “Dora, you may ask me, if you wish.”

  “Peter—”

  “I’m not angry anymore. I suppose that you were bound to wonder and to stare.” He touched the cross upon his neck and looked away. “We’ve both been poking at each other’s secrets, haven’t we? But I never thought you would—I hope you don’t regret what you have told me?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He nodded briefly as if to reassure himself.

  “Dora, perhaps you’ve guessed already—I don’t know. You keep crime journals, do you not? Take another look through them when you get home. The truth is that my family—that they were—It was not an accident, or illness, do you understand?” His voice was soft and hoarse; each word seemed painful to him. I watched him quietly and waited. His gentle manner had been so comforting through my own confession; I hoped that now my silence would encourage him to speak.

  “I had a headache that Christmas Eve,” he continued after a pause. “Not a real one, mind you. The sort of headache that a child gets when he does not want to do what has been asked of him. We were supposed to visit a family friend that night. The servants had all gone; the house was to be shut up for several days. And at the last minute I put up a fight. I was too ill, the road too long, the night too cold. In truth I simply disliked the family friend’s small daughter, who had this habit of following me everywhere and commenting on everything I did. It was nothing really, but it was enough for me, apparently. Have you ever stopped to think how little choices like that one, how insignificant decisions can alter the course of an entire lifetime? For months after that night I had nothing else to think about.”

  He fell silent for a moment and closed his eyes. I saw his forehead tense, his face go white; a sheen of moisture glimmered on his lip. When he finally continued, it was in a halting, gentle tone, like that of a young boy seeking pardon. “They stayed back with me, of course. Charlotte, Trevor, and my parents. They could not leave me all alone, especially not on Christmas. Trevor was furious with me. Mother tried to calm him down; she convinced him that we could make our own little celebration. She lit the fire in the drawing room, brought out some sweets and cordials, and we gathered beside the hearth for a midnight family picnic. It was a perfect night, the snowflakes dancing white and pure outside our window, the wind roaring in the chimney, the warmth and crackle of the fireplace. We were laughing soon; my father had a gift for storytelling, and he told us scores of silly tales about his childhood. I think they knew that I’d been faking illness. But I was the youngest, it was Christmas, and so they humored me.”

  He put one hand over his eyes. “Dora, I was the one who saw them first—”

  I had stopped breathing now. I could see what he was seeing in his memory: a dark room, a family in blankets and slippers around a cheerful fire and—

  “—Three men. All dressed in black. An older man and his two sons. They had not made a sound in entering the house. I found out later that they’d been tipped off by our new maid. She had left the window in the study open for them. As they walked into the light, I saw a tremor of surprise flash over the old man’s face. They had expected to find the place deserted and so had come armed only with their tools and the knife that they had used to slide the shutters open. I called out when I saw them, and the three men froze. Then my father rose to challenge them, and my mother shouted for us to run. I think she had guessed what the men were thinking. The burglars had not turned and fled when they discovered us; that could only mean one thing—they had decided not to leave witnesses behind who could describe them.

  “My brother, my sister and I—we all ran. We tried to hide—” He paused here and looked at me for the first time sinc
e the beginning of his story. His face was drawn and bloodless, his eyes, hollow, dry, as if he had long ago spent their tears. His voice sank to a pleading whisper. “Dora, please, you can guess what happened next? I don’t have to go through it again? At the inquest they made me describe it all—every detail, everything I saw. Please, Dora, I don’t want to—”

  I put my hand on his. “You didn’t have to tell me all of this, Peter. I should never have asked you to.”

  He stared at me for a long moment and finally shook his head. “It’s all right. I’m not sorry that I told you. It’s just—” He paused again and plucked absently at the fingers of my glove. “Guilt is a strange feeling, isn’t it? You’re sorry for your last words to your mother—but no matter what you would have said to her—she would not have lived. You did not change anything when you told her how you felt. And you had been wronged too, in a way. But me—Dora, if it hadn’t been for me—my family would be alive today. And this”—he ran his fingers over his scar—“I feel more guilty about this than I do anything else.”

  “But—but why? They tried to hurt you too—”

  “No, they didn’t,” he responded, interrupting me. “I did this to myself. That was how I escaped.”

  I did not understand what he was saying. How had that helped him? And why did he feel guilty for it? He was looking at me now, not speaking, a question on his face, a tired, silent plea. Please guess the truth, his eyes seemed to beg me. Don’t make me say it.

  I was not sure how to begin. The terror of that night seemed to loom before us; I felt it pushing on me, the frozen horror of his memories, like cold fingers around my throat. And then I saw the scene before me, and felt his panic as he tripped, racing down the hall, desperate to escape. “You were trapped,” I began slowly, cautiously. “Hiding in a room. There was no way out.”

  He nodded. “The window was frozen shut.”

  “Just outside the door—you heard the chaos, you knew what would happen when they found you.”

  He shut his eyes, and nodded once again.

  “And you thought—if you cut yourself, if you pretended—if one of them saw you lying silent on the ground, saw the bloody neck—he might just assume that one of the others had done the deed. In the confusion, in their hurry, they might not check with one another.”

  “He never even came near me.”

  “But, Peter, why do you feel guilty about that? Your plan came off, and you survived.”

  His eyes flew open. He turned angrily to me and pulled his hand away from mine. “Yes, my trick worked very well. And I should be proud of that, should I?” His jaw was clenched and he was speaking now through gritted teeth. “Don’t you understand, Dora? I heard everything, I even saw—and all I could think then was how to save myself. I was planning, working out a strategy. Does that seem natural to you? In those first few minutes, when we were trying to escape, my sister distracted one of the men on purpose. She shouted at him and then fled in the opposite direction so that I had time to hide. That was her plan—to sacrifice herself to save her brother. And I? I only managed to make a plan to save myself.”

  I could not think of a response. He had been only thirteen years old, I reflected sadly. Why did he judge himself so harshly? What else could he have done? Surely someone had comforted him then, reassured him that he could not have saved them? Had there been a friend there to support him when he needed it the most? Or had he truly been surrounded by stern officers and coroners poking at his tragedy, poking him for testimony?

  And what was left for me to say to him? He did not want to hear me babble words of sympathy. He had probably heard them all before.

  “Peter—?” I ventured finally after a long silence.

  “What, Dora?”

  “Did they catch the men who did it?”

  “No.” He nearly bit the word in half. “The police bungled the case horribly. I was only thirteen at the time, and even I could see that. By the time the inspector thought to call in Sherlock Holmes, weeks later, it was too late. They’d fled the country by then. Still, despite the long delay, Mr. Holmes was able to track their escape route. He found out which ship they’d boarded, and he traced them to New York and from there on to Chicago. But after that the trail went cold.”

  “And since then there’s been no sign of them?”

  “Nothing. Not a word or a clue for near four years.”

  “But they couldn’t have just vanished,” I protested. “Maybe they were in some accident or were killed during another criminal attempt.”

  He gave a harsh laugh and shook his head. “It would be nice to think that, wouldn’t it? Not a satisfying conclusion, perhaps, but at least an ending, of sorts.”

  “But you don’t believe it?”

  “Not for a moment. They’re alive, I’m absolutely certain of that.”

  “I can’t imagine how awful that must be,” I said, “living with the knowledge that they were walking free. Especially right after it happened.”

  “Believe it or not, Dora, the knowledge that they hadn’t been caught actually supported me at first,” he replied. “It’s ironic, but it was the thought that those murderers were still alive that helped me survive those first few months.”

  “How do you mean?”

  He didn’t answer me right away; he was gazing off into the distance as if he was seeing the memory playing out in front of him. “It was something to hope for, to look forward to,” he told me finally. “At the time there didn’t seem to be anything else to live for. It wasn’t until quite a while later that I grasped the fact that they would never actually be caught. It seemed impossible to me then. If Mr. Holmes hadn’t admitted to me that he’d finally come to a dead end, I would never have believed it.”

  He smiled wryly and shook his head. “When Sherlock Holmes tells you that he’s exhausted every option, you have no choice but to accept it. But he promised me that he would never give up until we’d found them. That was exactly how he phrased it, too. Until we’d captured them, he said. As if he was including me in the investigation. You may smile if you like, but that one statement helped me more than all the sympathetic nonsense that I’d heard until then.”

  “No, I can understand that, actually; I think I would have felt the same,” I said. “Mr. Holmes appreciated how guilty and powerless you felt, and so he helped you direct your anger toward a purpose. It gave you a reason to go on.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. His voice softened, and the tension in his face relaxed a little. “I don’t think that he ever imagined I would take it this far, though. But when he saw that I’d become interested in his line of work he encouraged me—in his own way. He would call on me when he needed a young assistant or a messenger boy. It was an unusual sort of kindness, I suppose, but it meant everything to me then.”

  “You must have been disappointed that he wasn’t looking for a permanent assistant,” I observed. “I imagine I would have been.”

  “I was sorry about that, certainly,” he replied. “But I was hardly surprised. You didn’t know him, Dora, or you wouldn’t have expected any different.”

  “I didn’t know him, it is true,” I said. “But I wish I had—even if in the end he wouldn’t have wanted to know me.”

  He smiled kindly and shook his head. “I wouldn’t think of it like that. I know I told you that he loved his independence. And he could be cold sometimes, especially when he was focused on a case and had forgotten everyone else around him. But that doesn’t mean that he was cruel. It rather depended on his mood, I think. Still, even during his warmest moments, he was not what anybody would ever call affectionate—”

  “Oh, I know that!” I interjected with a laugh. “I’ve read the stories, after all.”

  “Of course you have. So you know what I am talking about, then. Still, I’ll never forget that I have him to thank for setting me on this path. I don’t know what would have become of me if I hadn’t met him. I certainly wouldn’t be here now.”

  “Aren’t you fo
rgetting Mr. Porter?” I smiled. “He was the one who took you on. Although I still don’t understand why you ever agreed to work for him.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Oh, honestly, Dora, you needn’t look so baffled. That is the least mysterious portion of the tale. Simply put, I could not establish my own practice. I was too young, without experience, without a name. Mr. Porter was a distant relative with a modest practice, some expensive habits, and no capital. I had a small inheritance. So we struck a bargain. I have not had reason to regret my choice.”

  “Really? Well, I suppose that you know best.”

  He shrugged. “He is a decent investigator, with some good qualities. And he was my only option at the time. Ah, but if I had known that a budding young detective was soon to descend on London and take the Underworld by storm—”

  “Oh, stop it, please. I am hardly a detective, sir. I am hardly much of anything anymore. Tomorrow morning Adelaide and I return to Newheath, and then it’s over for me. At least I can look forward to following your career—in the papers. I don’t suppose our paths will cross again.”

  “Indeed? No more trips to London? Don’t tell me that your aunt intends for you to ‘come out’ in your little town!”

  I rose and walked over to the path. “Well, naturally, Mr. Cartwright, I will be in London for some portion of next Season. But what has that to do with you?”

  He got up off the bench and followed me. “Oh, so I’m ‘Mr. Cartwright’ once again? Very well, Miss Joyce, I will not argue with you. Good-bye, then.”

  “Farewell, sir,” I told him simply and extended my hand to him. I was determined to be sensible now. The evening had begun in grim confessions; at least in parting, I hoped to be composed. There would be plenty of time to mourn after he had gone.

  He smiled wearily, and swept his cap off. With a respectful, casual bow, he touched his lips briefly to my fingertips, then paused thoughtfully, turned my hand over, and gazed at it as if he meant to read my fortune through my glove. His fingers were barely touching mine but I could feel their warmth as surely as if he held me. And now he was leaning down again, his mouth just inches from my hand, his shallow breathing cool against my skin. I was suddenly conscious of every fiber in the cloth over my palm, every crease across his knuckles, every skip and tremble of my baffled pulse. With a rapid movement, at once careless and deliberate, he pushed the ruffle of my glove aside and pressed his lips against my wrist.