In the Company of Sherlock Holmes

by Leslie S. Klinger

My heart pumped. My hand shook. I blinked and my lips formed the same soundless words when I first heard that my parents had been murdered: This isn’t really happening.

  Then the shadow vanished, and in its place, the outline of a small hand with thin, tapered fingers appeared on the wall.

  I let out an icy breath. I was crackling with fear.

  After my parents died, I had waited, hoped for something like this to happen. Something supernatural. Something like what I wrote about in my books: Possessions; Witch; Damned. Messages from beyond the grave. The name of their killer, whispered in my ear. Assurance that they were in a better place. I had visited mediums and gone to séances. But I’d done too much research into the “business,” and I saw all the tricks. A couple of times I let myself be scammed just in case there was a grain of truth mixed in with all the BS, but eventually I gave up the hunt and concentrated on Italian police procedure, Roman forensics. Science. But this was not science. This was the provenance of my obsession. So I told myself that I was imagining it. That I was still asleep.

  The hand remained on the wall, not so much a shadow as an imprint, very dark and clear. Very real.

  It had to be a prank set up by my law firm or the Holmes people. “Hello?” I said loudly. “Nicely done.” No response. So I unzipped my sleeping bag and went hunting for a projector, or a scrim instead of a plaster wall. I found none.

  Then I tripped on an apple that had not been on the floor when I had gone to bed, and fell forward. I put out my hand to catch myself, right against the hand on the wall, and with a scream I fell through sodden, pliant plaster. There was a space behind it; I jerked my hand away and looked up at the watermark on the ceiling. The rain was coming in through the wall.

  But the rain had not left an apple on the floor.

  My hair stood on end. I grabbed my phone to call the police but I wasn’t actually sure how to. Somehow I remembered that the UK number was different from Italy’s, but the only thing that came to mind was “666.” I told myself that the apple had been accidentally gathered up in my things as we moved me downstairs. That the crying and the images had been part of a dream.

  But I was shaking as I did a cursory search of the house. The windows and doors were boarded up, and there was no sign that anyone else was inside. I went back downstairs and looked inside the hole my hand had punched. There were so many cobwebs behind the plaster wall that at first I thought they were fiberglass. I spotted something at the bottom, and it was a simple matter to push my way through the mushy wall down to the baseboard.

  It was a small, rotted wooden box.

  “Okay, then, the game’s afoot,” I murmured, shivering with fear and maybe a dollop of excitement.

  I opened it.

  3 April, 1890

  My dear Lucy,

  Your letter of 6 February arrived, and I thanked heaven on my knees for the mercy it contained. How kind you are to forgive me and to help me after I attempted to cast you into a criminal light, the better to hide in the shadows of my own guilt when I took the coronet! I was wild with fear when my uncle engaged the services of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, he of the sharp and spiderlike countenance, for I perceived that his brilliant mind should unravel the tangled web that I had woven. It was with the terror of one drowning that I suggested you and the greengrocer, Mr. Prosper, (newly your husband, you tell me! I wish you joy!) as potential partners in crime. I am wholly undeserving of your charity.

  For myself, I doubt I shall ever feel joy again. You know what my uncle is, but as temperamental as he can be, I see only now how he strives to act gently toward his own. After my father died of his lingering illness and Uncle Alexander took me in, I thought I should live the life I had only dreamed of. Balls, concerts, plays, frivolities! My youth had been spent in the sickroom, but I thrilled that I should pass young womanhood in gay company, enjoying the delights of society! But all too soon I saw that my uncle wished me to stand in as the lady of the house, and not as its indulged young daughter. Imagine my dismay!

  I thought to turn to his son, my cousin Arthur, to serve as my guide into society, but as he loved me, it was impossible to separate his feelings from my purpose. To allow him to be my escort would be to accede to his request for my hand. Additionally, I detected in my dear cousin a nervous tendency to please those he believed to be his betters—the wealthy dandies of his club—and I sensed that I would be trading one prison for another: married life beside a young, agitated man who would eventually judge me lacking, as he judged himself, because I was with him.

  It was so bitter to watch the last roses fading in my cheeks as I made my rounds throughout our house—ordering our provisions, supervising our staff, always an organizer and observer of life. Then into that life Sir George Burnwell rode like a knight upon a charger. He was urbane, sophisticated, worldly, and so brilliant! He had been everywhere, done everything. Knew everyone. He promised to share such a life with me. I was utterly mad with happiness!

  Once I was completely besotted, Sir George told me a complicated tale of heaps of debts he had paid on my cousin Arthur’s behalf—which, he said, Arthur had concealed from his father. I quite believed him, as Arthur was always asking Uncle Alexander for advances on his allowance. Sir George allowed that because of his protection of my cousin’s good name at the club, he had fallen into distress himself. I, in my intemperate and sheltered way, thought to even that score by giving him the coronet. As I write these lines, it is all so ridiculous, but I was caught up in the drama and excitement. It happened so fast—the arrival of the coronet, the plan to sell it to make good on all those crushing debts—that at the time it did not seem like madness. As you are well aware, I left my uncle’s home in the dead of night like the thief I was, and presented myself to Sir George.

  But he informed me that he had changed his mind and had already returned the coronet to my uncle. Yet my fate was cast! I could not go back to Fairbank. I had already admitted my guilt. And that is when Sir George married me—rue the day!

  I know that your lot is not easy, Lucy, even though you now retain the happy title of wife, and I am sure you are shaking your head in disbelief as you read these lines. Yet this very moment, had I the power to change my station, I would beg for employment as a scullery maid at Fairbank!

  I must be as frank as I must be brief. Fear of discovery informs every word I write to you. We live on a small island, cut off from all society, though we are not so distant from London as one might think. Still we are a world away. Sir George is . . . unkind, and as short of money as he professed to be. Yet he spends what little we have on drink. Also, I fear, worse things. I am uncertain of all his weaknesses, as he banished me when I was with child to a separate wing of the house. Such as the house is: a mansion crumbling and falling into the waters that isolate us from the mainland. I must depend on a small ferry, oared by a good man whose occupation it is to move islanders to town and vice versa. We have become friends . . . but friends only, I assure you.

  The only reason Sir George has not gambled away our island home is that he can’t; it’s entailed. It must be passed down to his eldest son. But we cannot leave because we have nowhere else to go. His fair-weather friends have deserted him, or perhaps word has gotten ‘round what a bounder he truly is. Not one word of congratulation reached his ears upon the birth of his child, our son, dear Charles George Alexander.

  Little Charles is a beautiful, sunny child, and I do not deserve him. He is my sole reason for continuing. Without him I fear I would plunge myself into the waters off our island, no matter the consequences to my soul. Lucy, I fear for my baby’s well-being. Despite our continued habitation in the most distant wing of the house, Sir George says that Charles’s incessant crying is driving him mad. He is only bitter and cruel in regards to his heir. I think that he would abandon us here, if only he dared. I am legally bound to him body and soul, as is our child, but I cannot subject Charles to Sir George’s frightful temper. George has twenty times the ferocity of my uncle at his wildest
moments. And so . . . I plan. I wonder if I may depend upon your aid?

  With thanks for your Christian charity, I am,

  Mary Burnwell, née Holder

  I was stunned. The Trust would go wild when they read the letter. No one had ever known what had happened to Mary Holder, and it appeared as though we were all about to find out.

  There was another letter:

  5 May

  Dear Lucy,

  I have found increasing sympathy and kindness in the form of the boatman who sends our letters back and forth. (Although I hasten to assure you that nothing untoward has transpired between us—he is married, as am I). He and his dear wife have waited nigh these six years for a child of their own, and so he reminds me that while there is much about my situation that does not engender envy, in this one area he counts me most fortunate. He himself has given me the courage to attempt my escape, and for this I am sincerely grateful.

  I am ever so grateful, and at your service always,

  Mary Burnwell, née Holder

  And then another:

  19 May

  Dear Lucy,

  I have had an interview with someone whom I previously thought my enemy. Our talk has come to a sad conclusion and therefore, I must change my hopes. I had thought simply to leave on a steamer, arrive in London, and make my way to my uncle with my babe in my arms. There I would plead for sanctuary. But it has been explained to me that the law is quite on my husband’s side. He can take my baby from me, and I am sure that he would.

  With this great person as my ally, I have arranged with my friend the boatman to fake my death, and that of my tiny boy. Once hope has fled, I will board the Hampstead under the name of Mrs. Able Brown, and reunite with you at the London Docks. My ally has arranged for my trunk to be sent on to you, aboard the Hampstead on its usual route Tuesday next.

  Of my child . . . for the time, he will be with two who love him dearly, and if the situation looks to be against me, they shall raise and love little Charles as their own. With assistance from my previous supposed foe, I have made arrangements that they shall not suffer for their kindness. I dare not print their names even here, but will tell all when the time is right.

  Therefore, look for me, on 10 June, at the docks. Not one word, I beg you, not one, to either my uncle or to Arthur, my cousin. I must see how I fare before I take them on. And then, God willing, we shall find a way to reunite my son with his true family.

  On your discretion hangs my happiness.

  M.

  The next item was a newspaper article dated 10 June, 1890:

  THE HAMPSTEAD SINKS

  All lives lost!

  I read the article with a cold, heavy heart: steaming down the Thames Estuary from Kent, the Hampstead foundered, then quickly took on water. She listed to starboard, and sank. It happened in mere minutes, and all crew and passengers were lost. Holding my breath, my eyes ran down the passenger manifest.

  Mrs. Able Brown.

  I took a moment to feel the death. Grief was so familiar to me; it was a comfortable, known feeling. An old companion, if not a friend.

  Mary Holder hadn’t made it. After everything she’d gone through, she’d died a tragic, random death.

  There was writing in the margin of the article: We decided not to tell Mr. Holder any of it, nor to give him the trunk. It would only break his heart. Lucy Parr Prosper.

  There was nothing else in the box.

  I became aware that the crying had stopped, and my own cheeks were wet with tears.

  And that someone was knocking hard on the front door and calling out, “Ms. Holder? Ms. Nancy Holder?”

  It was ten in the morning. I had no memory of sitting there all night long, but I had to compose myself before I could go upstairs and answer the door. I wiped my face and blew my nose. Apparently I had had a very long cry.

  My visitor was Kim Jones, from the Trust. He was a nice-looking guy around my age, and he was very apologetic about coming by without receiving a callback confirming that it was convenient. He’d been afraid that I’d had no cell reception and so had been unable to reply. I checked my phone. He’d called an hour before.

  I was alarmed. Since the night of the murders, I had never missed a single phone call. I took them all, even the come-ons and the scams, in case it was the one that somehow, through whatever convoluted means, broke my parents’ case. I woke up even if I had taken something to help me sleep. But I hadn’t heard his call.

  It frightened me. It made me want to fly back to Rome immediately.

  I didn’t tell him about the box, not then, although I put it in my oversized purse. I wanted to think the story through. I hadn’t had any coffee, or a shower, or even brushed my teeth. It was frigid in the house and I didn’t have any running water. I knew Brits were generally polite and oblique, but I asked him straight out, American style, if he could help me. He took me to the Holmes Trust office, which wasn’t far from the British Museum. The place was furnished with Holmes’s own furniture, a Victorian settee and overstuffed chairs, and he told me that if I wished, they could make a room up for me to stay in furnished with Holmes’s own bed. Everyone there made much of me. No one there mentioned my parents, and I wondered if they knew.

  After a croissant and some coffee, I finally showed them the box. They were jubilant.

  “We have to let Shipley have a look,” they kept saying over and over. Finally Kim explained to me that Will Shipley was one of the curators at the Holmes wing of the museum, and he had made it something of a hobby to investigate what had happened to Mary Holder. He was already on the list of people they wanted me to meet.

  A coterie of Trust employees joined Kim and me for the walk to the museum. It was much more modern than I had expected. The Holmes Wing was enormous, containing carriages, interiors of rooms, opera capes and top hats, deerstalker caps, pistols, a walking stick concealing a wicked blade, a Stradivarius violin, a myriad of magnifying lenses, tiny glass vials and bottles, a doctor’s bag with the initials JHW, a tin box, pipes, syringes, and the Persian slipper where Holmes kept his tobacco.

  Kim knocked on a door marked WILL SHIPLEY ASS’T CURATOR, and soon I was showing the box and its contents to an older but still handsome man in a nubby gray sweater and black wool trousers. His blue eyes gleamed as he examined what I had brought. I didn’t tell him about the weeping or the apparitions. I still didn’t know if they had really happened. I kept telling myself that they had to have been real, because we had the box, but why this? Why now? Why not all the thousands of times I had begged the universe to tell me what had happened to my parents?

  I put my trembling hands in my pockets and said yes, I was cold, and Kim assured me there would be tea.

  Will Shipley put on white cloth gloves and picked up each letter and the newspaper article with both hands, as if they were fragile pieces of glass. I imagined the Roman police sifting through the debris they had collected from the alley where my parents were murdered with as much reverence. I had gone down to their labs. I had looked at their photographs. I called them constantly. They were never offended. They looked at me with their soulful Italian eyes, like Caravaggio paintings, and told me how sorry they were that they had nothing new to tell me.

  “A trunk,” Shipley marveled. “Lucy Parr Prosper collected Mary Holder’s trunk.”

  When my parents had been murdered, I’d had to go public with my pleas for information, for clues: there had been none. But the Trust had prodigious databases and worldwide connections. Sherlock Holmes was much beloved.

  A week passed, with no more weeping, or shadows, but still I stayed at Fairbank every night. . Waiting, hoping, in the same stasis in which I had spent years of my life. Kim, Will, and their colleagues were galvanized, as merry as Holmes ever was on their treasure hunt. I also sensed deep hope on their part; they were waiting for me to make some kind of announcement regarding my plans for the house. They still didn’t know that I was living off pennies.

  There were no developments in
Rome. One of my favorite police detectives left the force to open a clothing store in Milan.

  On my ninth day in England, a lead seemed to come in. There was a trunk in a farmhouse, but it turned out to be from the 1940’s. Will and Kim were disappointed, but scrupulously polite.

  “I’m still convinced that the ‘ally’ was Holmes himself,” Will said one night. “You know, when Dr. Watson wrote about your family’s case, he made mention that Sherlock Holmes pocketed a one-thousand-pound reward. I like to think he gave the thousand pounds to Mary Holder.” He smiled at me. “To fund the shipping of the trunk, and pay for the passage on the Hampstead. And to compensate ‘the two’ for her son’s care.”

  “She didn’t say anything about that in her letters,” I pointed out.

  “No, but it may have been discussed in a previous letter. Or perhaps she wanted to be discreet on the subject. Victorians were weird about money.”

  Unlike us, I thought. I was pretty sure he knew by then that I had no money; more often than not, he offered to pay for dinner. And though I didn’t want to let him, I did. I had begun to ponder the notion of subletting my apartment in Rome. But then the old panic set in: I had to be there to watch over my parents’ case.

  “She had to have money to set her plan in motion,” he said. “I doubt Sir George was giving her any. So unless she stole it out of his pockets, I would imagine she got it by other means.”

  I almost said then that the Trust would have to fix Fairbank by other means. But I looked into his eyes and I thought about—maybe not wedding anniversaries, but possibilities. His dreams. His hopes. The Holmes Trust. A wider world than a grubby alley.

  “What do you think happened to the trunk?” he asked. “Do you think the Prospers gave it to Holmes? What if there was something amazing in it, that helped him solve some other case?”

  He was so excited. I realized that I spent my nights at Fairbank listening for tears; I was focused on dashed hopes and death. He saw clues and puzzles and excitement.