by David Marcum
“Not enough,” I said, less graciously than I might.
“I have been hard at work, as you see,” he said, ignoring my tone and indicating the papers on the table before him.
“I take it you have not slept?”
“No, I have had much exercise this morning in the exorcism of ghost.” He laughed at his joke and I smiled, despite my fatigue. It was pleasant to see him in such good spirits.
“What have you learned?” I asked, as I poured almost-cold coffee into my cup.
“All in good time, Watson,” he said. “I think you will find your answers at six o’clock.”
He would say no more, and I was forced to fret for the next several hours. Precisely at six, there was a knock on our front door and a moment later, a tall, thin man entered our rooms.
“Mr. Edwin Booth?” Holmes said, rising and shaking the fellow’s hand. “I am Sherlock Holmes. This is my friend and colleague Doctor Watson. Please sit down and be comfortable.”
The actor, square jawed and sad eyed, sat on the chair. “I have been asking about you, Mr. Holmes,” he said in a soft New England accent. “I understand you are a solver of puzzles.”
“That is true,” said Sherlock Holmes.
“I have no puzzles for you to solve.”
“No. You are the solution to another man’s puzzle.”
“Ah.”
I was, I confess, utterly bewildered by this exchange, but the truth was starting to become clear.
“Asia Booth was your sister,” Holmes said. “A most beloved sister.”
“She was,” he replied, with a stifled sob. “And that villain Clarke made her life as miserable as any man can inflict on a good wife.”
“Tell us,” Holmes said gently.
“Asia was the darling of the family, a beauty who had any number of suitors. Before the terrible events of 1865, my family’s name was an honourable one. In my opinion, it still is, but I shall say more on that anon.
“I should add that I was not close to my brother, John Wilkes. Our politics could not have been more different. I favoured the Union and had enormous respect for our beloved president. Wilkes supported the south and saw Lincoln as the enemy. When I told him that I had voted for Lincoln, my brother said he feared the president would be made king. He was, I may say, quite insane on the subject, though he was reasonable enough in other matters.”
“What was your sister’s relationship with her brother Wilkes?”
“She adored him. He was her favourite, more than any of the rest of us. She could see nothing but the sweet boy he once had been. She even wrote a biography - I might almost call it a hagiography - of him.”
Tears filled his expressive eyes and I called to mind the reviews I had read of his Hamlet. Many considered Edwin Booth the finest Shakespearean actor of the day.
“All our lives were shattered when Wilkes fired that terrible shot,” he added. “Asia’s, too, though I am sure she did not fully comprehend it at the time.”
“I understand she was bearing twins during this period,” Holmes said.
“Yes. It was a very difficult pregnancy for her. Then she lost her brother and her family name. Her husband Clarke was arrested and blamed her for it.”
“Yes, he mentioned that,” I said. “But I do not understand why he was arrested. Surely he knew nothing of his brother-in-law’s plans?”
“He was wholly innocent, as least as far as the assassination goes,” he said. “But Wilkes had left many incriminating documents in his house. I doubt Clarke knew anything about it, but Asia... I cannot say with any certainty that she knew nothing of the matter. Please understand, I am not saying she knew what Wilkes was planning to do, but she could hardly have been unaware of his politics or his passion.”
“Women in confinement often pay little heed to the world outside their pending motherhood,” I said. “Even if he had dropped any hints to her of his intentions, she may not have realised until it was too late.”
“So I like to think, Doctor. Despite the passage of time, I find Wilkes’ actions utterly incomprehensible.”
“Even now, so many years after those events, Clarke is bitter about his arrest,” Holmes said. “I cannot say I blame him, so far as that goes. It seems a grave injustice, particularly if he was, as you say, wholly unaware of your brother’s plans.”
“People were horrified by the events and their anger made them unjust. I know why Clarke was so outraged. He thought that I and others in my family ought to have been arrested instead. Even his wife...”
“He blamed your sister for his arrest?”
“He blamed her for everything - for her name, for her family, for her brother. He said he wanted a divorce.” Booth’s contempt was blistering. “She refused, of course.”
“Yet he remained married to your sister,” I commented. “She accompanied him to England. They must have reconciled.”
“No, indeed. It was a marriage in name only. His contempt for my sister never abated. If you had seen the letters she wrote to her family. Heart-breaking letters. Clarke acted as if he were single and he made no secret of his many infidelities. He made the last years of her life an utter misery. He hastened her death, I have no doubt.”
“When did she die?”
“Last May.”
“And that is when you began to think of punishing him,” Holmes said.
Booth’s gaze met Holmes’s and held. “No doubt you think it a childish thing to do, Mr. Holmes. Perhaps it was. But giving him a small fright after his contemptable decades of abuse of my beloved sister was a very small justice.”
“You will find no opprobrium here, Mr. Booth,” Holmes said. “Under the circumstances, I should say you acted with considerable restraint.”
“So you were the ghost of Lincoln,” I said. “But... how?”
“An easy matter for an actor,” Booth replied. “I applied the ghastly phosphorous greasepaint that we use for the ghost of Hamlet’s father, for instance. The false beard and top hat were really all I needed to complete the look. Clarke’s own guilty conscience did the rest.”
“How did you get into the theatre?”
“Actors always can gain access to a theatre,” Booth replied. “In this instance, I simply slipped in at the end of the show and hid when the audience left. I waited until everyone had gone home. I had been following Clarke for some weeks; I knew his routine. It was a very simple matter. I stayed in the theatre, donned my disguise, and that was that. It is some years since Clarke and I last saw each other. The makeup and costume helped to sell the illusion and his guilty conscience did the rest.” He rose and put on his top hat. “May I ask what report you will make to my former brother-in-law, Mr. Holmes?”
Holmes smiled. “I shall tell him Lincoln’s ghost is satisfied for the moment, but he must behave himself or I cannot answer for the consequences. I shall not mention your name.”
Booth shook Holmes’s hand and mine, and left.
I sat in moody silence for some time that evening. So fatigued was my state, it took me an hour to ask the obvious questions: “Holmes, how did you know it was Booth? How did you find him?”
“An easy matter, Watson. A little research in the British Library told me all I needed to know about Clarke and his relationship to the Booth family. Whispers of his caddish behaviour to his late wife have circulated for some time. A servant in Richmond was happy to tell me a lot of gossip about their marriage and Clarke’s... well, let us call it indifference to her. When I learned that Asia Booth died in May, the timing of this ‘haunting’ seemed far too coincidental.
“I knew that Asia Booth was related to the most renowned theatrical family in America. My suspicions that one of her talented kinfolk was behind Clarke’s ‘haunting’ were confirmed by the greasepaint I discovered in the theatre. My next step was a
visit to the shipping office. The confirmation of the arrival of Mr. Edwin Booth was the final piece of the puzzle. I obtained Booth’s address from the shipping office and invited him to call upon me this evening. The rest you know.” Holmes yawned and stretched. “A remarkable man, Mr. Edwin Booth. I regret never having seen him on stage. What a Prince of Denmark his must have been.”
Holmes sent a brief telegram to Clarke telling him the matter had been dealt with. He did not mention Edwin Booth. We never saw either man again.
I confess I was very sorry to hear of Edwin Booth’s death five years later. He gave great pleasure to many people and was, according to the obituaries, highly esteemed in his circle.
We also learned that he had, apparently, once saved the life of Lincoln’s son Robert. Even allowing for the exaggerations of the newspaper, it made me wonder at the way fate had linked those two families together.
Holmes dismissed the matter as coincidence, of course.
The Manor House Ghost
by S. Subramanian
“I am glad to meet you, sir,” said [Mycroft Holmes], putting out a broad, fat hand like the flipper of a seal. “I hear of Sherlock everywhere since you became his chronicler. By the way, Sherlock, I expected to see you round last week to consult me over that Manor House case. I thought you might be a little out of your depth.”
“No, I solved it,” said my friend, smiling.
“It was Adams, of course.”
“Yes, it was Adams.”
– “The Greek Interpreter”, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
Readers who have followed my accounts of the cases of Sherlock Holmes may recall that the conversation reported above was the first occasion I ever had of meeting my remarkable friend’s even more remarkable brother, Mycroft Holmes, the younger man’s senior by some seven years. The meeting took place at the Diogenes Club, located not far from the Carlton in Pall Mall, a club created for the exclusive membership of London’s most eccentric misanthropes, among whose numbers Mycroft Holmes counted himself. The elder Holmes was an official at Whitehall from where he orchestrated the government’s most delicate operations of diplomacy and international political relations, conducted, for the most part, in the secret world, and under cover of the murky shadows of intrigue and espionage. In the younger brother’s candid estimation, the older was the most astute exponent of the art of scientific deduction and inferential logic he had ever known, but one whose sedentary occupation, coupled with his natural predisposition to laziness and the private comforts of a life without physical exertion or social intercourse, often left him with little scope for the exercise of his remarkable mental faculties, save only when he could enthuse himself sufficiently to engage in the undemanding pursuit of armchair reasoning.
My first acquaintance with the Diogenes Club and Mycroft Holmes, described by Sherlock Holmes as “two curiosities”, of which the first was “the queerest club in London” and the second was “one of the queerest men”, happened on a lovely summer evening of the year ‘88, and was the starting point of that singular train of events which I have described elsewhere under the heading of “The Greek Interpreter”. The case, readers may recall, was a demanding one which tested my friend’s powers of deduction to the hilt. Somehow, in the course of the exertions called forth by the investigation, I succeeded in forgetting the teasing allusion to “the Manor House case” that had cropped up in the exchange between my friend and his brother. It did come back to me later, and I often taxed Holmes with the demand for a detailed account of the matter. Because of his commitment to his various clients and of mine to my various patients, we somehow did not get around to discussing the matter again at any length for some months, until, in early November of that year, Holmes brought it up again.
“Pshaw!” he said one morning, tossing aside the newspaper he had been reading. “The nonsense which the press is pleased to serve up as ‘news’ to a hungry and accepting public is nothing short of scandalous. Have you seen the newspaper accounts of the murder recently committed near Hammersmith that has been variously referred to as ‘The Case of the Fulham Fiend’, ‘The Devil’s Hand in Denham’s Death’, and ‘The Vampire Horror’? Is there no end to the idiocies of the written word - at both its dispensing and its receiving ends?”
“It is the culture of commerce, Holmes,” I replied. “Sensation and scandal are what sell, not reason and moderation.”
‘No doubt, Watson. This puts me in mind of ‘the Manor House case’, alluded to by brother Mycroft when we met at the Diogenes Club some months ago, and in which you have been kind enough to display an interest from time to time. The case is intellectually unremarkable (hence Mycroft’s sly suggestion that it might have carried me out of my depth), but presents a good example of the grip which fantasy and un-reason can have upon the minds of a gullible public. See here, Watson: Here is a manuscript which had been passed on to me by Mycroft a week before our meeting that summer’s day at the Diogenes. The author of the manuscript is a young man by the name of Montague James - a writer, antiquarian, and don at the Royal College in Bridgeford University. Mycroft, in turn, had received the document from a common friend of his and James’. My brother is often the recipient of accounts of events which display some departure from the norm, or reflect signs of the bizarre and the outré.”
“And what is their source?”
“They are referred to him by one or other of his numerous eccentric friends and acquaintances, partly because the latter would like to have their curiosity satisfied by ‘what Mycroft makes of it all’, and partly because it pleases Mycroft to bend his brain to a consideration of these intellectual puzzles, whereby he is enabled to exercise his mind without having to go to the least trouble of exercising his body, not even to the extent of having to stir his substantial frame from the depths of comfort provided by his amply padded chair. From time to time, he sends these cases over to me for my opinion, and in order to compare notes. Our brief conversation on the Manor House affair, to which you were an auditor at the Diogenes, has reference to the contents of the document you now hold in your hand.”
I looked at the manuscript with some curiosity. It was a brief type-written document, and I riffled through its contents quickly.
“Why,” said I, “this purports to be a true ghost story!”
“Precisely,” said Holmes. “What is remarkable about the account is the deliberately muted style in which it has been written. It has none of the gore and crude brutality of the average tale of the supernatural such as you might expect to find in ‘shockers’ and penny-dreadfuls. To the contrary, its contents are related in a tone of uniform moderation and deliberation, not to say reflective scholarship and un-coercive persuasion. The effect of such a tract upon a credulous mind is, in my view, more insidious and lasting than would be the effect of a crass and sensation-mongering account. But let me leave it to you to decide what you make of it. Friend Lestrade has sent around a note threatening to make one of his periodic visitations upon us. You know how he likes to exchange notes and trade official gossip with me every once in a while. He will be here at six in the evening tomorrow. Perhaps we can chat about the ‘Manor House case’ when he is here.”
That night, I took to bed with me to read the document I had been given by Holmes. It is a short account, simply titled “A School Story”. Since then, it has been read, I am sure, by countless other people, in virtually unchanged form, but after a considerable hiatus in time from when it was first written. Indeed, it was many years from the time I speak of now that the story was eventually published, in 1911, in a collection of pieces titled More Ghost Stories from an Antiquary, by the now famous mediaevalist scholar and writer, M. R. James. To those that have read the story, it will come as no surprise that I found it to be a tale that occasioned me much disquiet and disturbance. I slept badly that night.
Promptly at six o’clock the following evening, Inspector Le
strade of Scotland Yard was at our chambers in Baker Street. Holmes made him welcome in his customary friendly manner.
“A pleasure, as always, Lestrade, to see you,” said he, “and to have the benefit of your - ah - scintillating ideas on crime and its detection. But first, pray divest yourself of your hat and coat and muffler, and sit down here by the fireside. Surely a whisky and soda would not be out of place on a cold evening such as this?”
“Don’t mind if I do, Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson,” said Lestrade, “I’m off duty now.”
“Splendid! If you will be so kind as to do the honours, Watson?”
Holmes observed Lestrade keenly as I poured out the drinks.
“It has been some time since last we met, Lestrade, so I know little of how life has been treating you in the last few weeks, save what I am able to deduce from my superficial observations of your person. It is clear that you have gained some weight - I should say a pound-and-a-quarter - that Mrs. Lestrade has been on vacation for some time now, that you have acquired a new razor, that your watch has been giving you a good deal of trouble lately, that your work has been taking you to the Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, that the poor state of the plumbing at home has added to your worries, that the new postman has been delivering your mail at the wrong address, and that you have been having a rough passage at work with a superior whose ignorance of police procedure is matched only by his shortness of temper.”
Lestrade started up in his chair before quickly subsiding again out of a proper regard for his own professional pride. “Correct in every detail, Mr. Holmes,” he conceded grudgingly.
“And aren’t you going to ask me how I came by my deductions?” enquired Holmes with amusement.
“Oh, I have worked it all out for myself, Mr. Holmes. To the Scotland Yard professional, the exercise is simplicity itself, the product of a most elementary sequence of deductions from known causes to logical effects.”