by Anita Janda
“Is there any aspect of the case that is still unclear to you, Watson?”
I roused myself with an effort. “I don’t think—no, you are right, I do have a question for you. How in the name of all that’s wonderful did you know that she was alive and he was dead? I examined those ears myself and they said nothing to me about the condition of their former owners. There’s not a pathologist in the City who could have done what you did. It was the first solid link in the chain. How did you do it?”
He sighed. “It wasn’t wonderful at all, Watson. It was common sense. The client tells us that there is a life in danger—one life. Ergo, she knows the fate of the other victim. I knew no more than you did, Watson, what that fate might be, but he (or she, Watson, or she!) was bound to be alive or dead, one or the other. The only safe response then to a question regarding the victims’ combined fates was that they were different: one was alive and one was dead. Had we made any other response to that very inconvenient question, we should have run the risk of being shown the door. It was a risk I did not care to take. The case interested me; I might even say it intrigued me. Grasping the conversational nettle with both hands was enough to render it harmless. Once I realized that the essential feature of the case was the form of address employed on the wrapping paper that had secured the cardboard box, I realized that the judicious response would in all likelihood turn out to be the literal truth.”
I left him at the corner of Oxford and the Edgware Road and made my way slowly home. Let him unpack his trunk himself, he could have replaced every last piece of equipment twice over with what he charged her.
It was good to leave the hansom behind, to feel the pavement beneath my feet, to breathe the somewhat fresher air of the open street. It was turning colder, I noticed. There would be frost by morning. Mary would be waiting to hear about the day’s events, everything that had happened since our breakfast was interrupted by the telegraphic appeal of an unknown diabetic familiar with Pondicherry Lodge. I don’t suppose Miss Cathcart realized that in sending that wire she was exchanging the “tactless incompetence of Scotland Yard” for the equally tactless competence of Sherlock Holmes, but she knows it now. And Lestrade is on the case. I was grinning as I rounded the corner and waved my Egyptian walking stick at my wife. Who did not recognize me.
“Oh, John! Don’t tell me you have been walking the streets like that, John! Have you met any of your patients? Our friends? Think, John! Oh, it is too bad of Mr Holmes!”
Chapter 3
Mary is beating the carpets and I am bid to keep writing, quite as though there were some point to this activity, which she assures me there is not.
“I can’t read your journal, John!” She was horrified at the prospect. “No, not even at your express invitation. Not though you should command me, John. I couldn’t. This is your diary, John, your private narrative journal. Don’t you understand? There are only two rules for keeping a journal: the entries must be dated and they must be safe from prying eyes—from my eyes, John. How would it be if after going to all this trouble to give you back the writing habit I were to interpose myself between you and the printed page, a self-appointed editor? You don’t need my approval, John. You never did. There are no wrong ways to keep a diary.”
* * *
I wish she had seen fit to tell me that when she gave me the blessed thing! Forbidden to speak of Holmes, my new diary thrust into my hands on every conceivable occasion, I have been laboring over this account of the Cathcart case for over a week. There are only two rules for keeping a diary and so far, I have broken them both. What can I possibly do for an encore?
Very well. If there are no wrong ways to keep a diary, then there is no reason for me to date my entries. I think in chapters, not the ordinary verse of everyday life. The calendar has no place here. “Once upon a time in Paddington” will do nicely, thank you. All great writing is timeless, anyway.
Mary’s other ruling has more weight. Apparently, I am to be encouraged to pursue the narrative activity by being relieved of the possibility of having any audience whatsoever for my narrative product. She will not read my journal and there’s an end to it. You can tell she used to be a governess.
Had I known that I was writing up the Cathcart case for my own amusement, I could have finished it in a matter of minutes. “HERMIA MARIE CATHCART: two ears, one box, tarred twine, one knot, sturdy wrapping paper disfigured by a heavy-handed scrawl and a Belfast postmark, plus an 1882 wedding photograph.” Oh yes, and Inspector Lestrade.
Holmes would dispute the point, I know, but Lestrade’s presence (“Lestrade? Guardian of the physical evidence for a murder he does not believe in, source of doubtful remarks, misleading conclusions, and erroneous theories—that Lestrade?”) is crucial. There is no doubt that Lestrade complicated things for Holmes, but that doesn’t mean I can leave him out any more than Holmes could. Scotland Yard must be notified in a case of murder.
Of course, I could arrange for Lestrade to be the one to contact Holmes instead of the other way around. That would help. That way, Lestrade could be baffled at the beginning of the investigation, where it would do no harm, instead of at the end, where he functions as an obstruction to justice.
“Murder, Mr Holmes? I doubt that. Why, the doctor will tell you that barring infection, an injury of this kind is the merest scratch.”
Neither was Lestrade impressed by the startling coincidence attached to the delivery of a package, however loathsome, to the very lady whose name and address were inscribed on its exterior.
“Let me understand you, Mr Holmes. The package that we see before us, bearing the inscription ‘Miss H. Cathcart’ and directed to this address, where your client, Miss Hermia Cathcart—I beg your pardon, Ma’am, Miss Hermia Marie Cathcart—has been the sole resident since her sister became Mrs Smith some six years ago and removed to Bristol, was actually intended for this Mrs Smith, is that right? And you dedooced this because Mrs Smith’s given name is Henrietta—excuse me, Henrietta Marie—and because she is the, ah, younger of the two ladies?”
It wasn’t until I stepped in to deny Lestrade all access to my patient that he began to comprehend the situation.
“You mean Mrs Smith is here? It is her ear? Why didn’t you say so?”
Lestrade is an impatient fellow. Personally, I had enjoyed Holmes’s exegesis. I always do.
* * *
Moving Lestrade to the introduction patches one tiny pinhole in a narrative fabric that is about as watertight as a piece of cheesecloth. What I need is a situation where Scotland Yard is baffled, Holmes makes himself useful, the mystery is solved, and justice, mercy and repentance prevail, with all parties concerned willing to see some version of the truth in print, disguised as fiction.
I can’t do anything with this. This is a situation where Holmes makes himself useful, the mystery is solved, Scotland Yard is baffled, and justice has very little to do with it. A case of adultery (suspected adultery, I should say) is no fit topic all by itself, and the addition of a couple of ears travelling by parcel post from Belfast to London only makes it worse. This is hardly the kind of thing I would care to set before my readers in the name of entertainment. I am no Fleet Street hyena. The madman who calls himself Jack the Ripper will get no encouragement from my pen. I can keep a secret.
I wish Mary would read this.
This morning’s Daily Telegraph included a small article, buried (as Holmes would put it) on an inside page, announcing that Alec Brownley, able-bodied seaman on the cargo ship Dainty Mary, has confessed to the brutal slaying of Stephen Smith, late of Bristol, whose dismembered body has been recovered from a shallow grave in Belfast. He was apprehended in Waterford by Scotland Yard’s own Inspector Lestrade, “acting on information received.” Mrs Smith, who was injured in the murderous attack that claimed her husband’s life, remains in seclusion with her family.
The information received was of course received from Sherlock Holmes, but it was not until I spoke to Holmes that I was able to appr
eciate how much error was contained in those few lines. His theory of the case had been proved in every particular. Far from having been acquired during the attack on her husband, Hettie Smith’s injuries had been its motivating force. In the light of Alec Brownley’s confession (and the continuing furor over the Ripper, which has driven almost every other item of public interest out of the papers), there was every reason to expect that Stephen Smith’s brutality to his wife would remain a Cathcart family secret.
According to Holmes, Brownley seemed glad of the opportunity to tell his story. The only difficulty they had lay in persuading him to keep to what they considered to be the topic. He wasn’t very interested in the murder, but kept coming back to the question of Hettie Smith. Why hadn’t she come? She knew he was on the Dainty Mary. Didn’t she know that he loved her? What must a man do to prove his devotion?
I am glad I didn’t see it. I shall have enough to do, living with the memory of Hettie’s anxious ramblings. “Brownley? Have you seen Brownley? Where is Brownley?” I don’t know when she will be well enough to be told about Alec Brownley and the cardboard box. Not for some time, certainly.
Holmes returned from events in Waterford, saying darkly, “I hope Hettie Smith has deserved to be loved like that.”
I had no answer for him then, but I remember a wedding photograph of a beloved bride and her young husband, and I remember my one-time patient, wounded in mind and body, and I do not believe that anyone has deserved to be loved like that.
Not like that.
Chapter 4
No one reading ‘A Study in Scarlet’ or ‘The Sign of Four’ would believe how difficult it can be to set such a tale to paper. They seem simple enough, plain round tales that begin at the beginning, muddle along when Holmes and I were muddled, and draw to a neat and tidy close in their own good time. I know, I’ve read them. I’ve read them so many times that I have lost all sense that I wrote them. I have read them so many times that the mere sight of me with the final versions in my hands is enough to set Mary fluttering about me. I have had to take them down to my surgery and content myself at home with studying my old notes for some clue as to the method I employed to arrive at those narratives. There must be a method, I tell myself, in defiance of my own memories.
It began innocently enough, I recall, as an attempt to make some return to Holmes for the interest, not to say the adventure, he had brought into my life. It seemed the least I could do and, as the least I could do, it provided steady occupation for a good many afternoons and evenings. Holmes grew quite used to the sight of me scribbling before the fire and proved remarkably patient in the matter of explaining how it was we happened to go here rather than there, to pursue this rather than that, to talk to this one rather than that one.
It was an occupation admirably suited to my condition and I was rather proud of myself for thinking to prescribe it. Physically, I was over the worst of it and if the slight stiffness on my left proved to be a fixture, it was still less noticeable an infirmity than many others created by the Jezail bullets of the Second Afghan war. For me, as for many people, however, the obstacle to full recovery was the convalescent idea. After a bout of enteric fever so severe as to leave my health as I thought permanently impaired, I found it all but impossible to imagine myself out and about as a matter of course, to be taken for granted by the world at large. Only a few short months ago, rising from my bed had been an act of heroism, worthy of applause. It felt that way still.
Holmes himself worked by fits and starts, often spending weeks at a time lying on the sofa, rising only to make an indifferent meal or to spend an hour or so scratching tuneless airs on his violin, a practice all the more infuriating once I learned what music he was capable of coaxing from it under other circumstances. How someone who can play so beautifully can endure such caterwauling!
I know now that these periods of apparent inertia are punctuated by the most intense mental exertion as he wrestles with possibilities to arrive at hidden truths. At the time, however, all I could think was that here was this perfectly healthy specimen who had never seen military service in his life and if he could spend the day on the sofa, staring into space and ruining his health with cocaine, then I could have another whisky and soda and write that letter, take that walk, read that book, visit that old friend, tomorrow. Or better yet, next week. I was restless, but not yet restless enough, and I felt no closer to resuming the practice of medicine then than I had been on the ship back from Peshawur, a prey to seasickness all the way.
I was more of an invalid than I knew in those early days, and very glad to find lodgings that were within the reach of my Army pension, roommate or no roommate. Having Sherlock Holmes as a roommate was in any event quite similar to having no roommate at all. To surrender the sitting room to Mr Holmes when he should chance to have a visitor proved to be no greater hardship in practice than it had seemed in theory, if only because there were so few visitors. I can honestly say that it was a good six months before it even occurred to me to wonder what service he might be rendering his clients, for such they clearly were. There was no discernible pattern that I could see—old or young, male or female, well to do or down and out, some in sickness, some in health, they came to him as if to their confessor and would be gone after an interview that often lasted only a quarter of an hour. If any came a second time I did not observe it, and that in itself was strange, for how did they come to hear of him when they needed him, or, more sinister still, when he needed them? How could a professional practice of any kind come to flourish if it satisfied a client in a single visit? What would become of medicine as a profession if the physician could arrest the course of an illness after one examination?
I am not a curious man but Holmes is, and it occurs to me now that whatever minor observations I was able to make about him in those days—and they are catalogued for the curious in ‘A Study in Scarlet’—must be as nothing compared to the observations he was able to make about me during those first crucial months in Baker Street. I can see now, as I could not see then, that he deliberately drew my attention to that magazine article of his, ‘The Book of Life’, and let me pronounce on the impossibility of the thing in order to be able to announce that he was its much misunderstood author, willing to demonstrate the truth of his preposterous claims to me, very nearly at my convenience, although my convenience hasn’t come into it much since then.
I do not know how many men, bored, restless, and with no immediate occupation to hand, could have resisted such an invitation, but I do know that I am not one of them. It has only just occurred to me that Holmes may have known as much about me himself. It would be very like him.
That first adventure, now famous as ‘A Study in Scarlet’, tested my physical and intellectual mettle in a way that made me glad my convalescence was behind me. In a way that let me see that my convalescence was in fact behind me. Afterwards, Holmes returned to Baker Street and retired to the sofa with his shag and his violin. I returned to Baker Street resolved to do no such thing.
While Holmes stretched before the fire in an apparent stupor, my mind was working furiously. I knew that my reaction to his article had not been founded in spleen, but rather was the reaction of any rational man confronted by an unknown caught boasting that he could do the impossible. It came to me in a moment of inspiration. Now that I had seen him do the impossible with my own eyes, I was in a position to contain that reaction by telling his story myself, as one might give evidence in a court of law. With that analogy firmly in view, I began to write. I identified myself, gave a quick synopsis of my background in witness of my probity, and was careful to mention our 221B Baker Street address often enough (I hoped) to catch the eye and ear of anyone who might need the services of a consulting detective. Holmes should not have to rely on cases that Scotland Yard had first been honest enough to give up as beyond their powers. There, at any rate, my opinion had not changed: it would be difficult, I thought, to sustain a professional practice of this kind, no matter how need
ed, unless it were at least known to those people who might in the course of time become paying clients.
There is a deal of difference between writing a letter and writing a story but for some reason, I did not realize that then and ‘A Study in Scarlet’ took shape steadily, giving me no serious difficulty and whiling away many a dreary hour. During this period, Holmes had several calls upon his time that he chose to pursue alone. Trivial matters, he called them, and perhaps they were, but they were not trivial to me. I redoubled my efforts on the manuscript.
Finally, the thing was done. I began to think that we would do very well together, he and I. Perhaps I was meant to be a Writer.
I read it through, weeding out the parenthetical material (Holmes brings out the parentheses in me, I’m afraid) and admiring the structure of it: its two Parts, with seven Chapters in each Part, had a certain military neatness that appealed to me. Then I read it through again, this time pretending to be Holmes, and found the difference disconcerting. The title, for example, would surely strike him as pompous or even overly sensational. Then again, a man who could call a magazine article ‘The Book of Life’ was in no position to…
It was my first experience of The Editorial Shift.
In the event, Holmes bore the ordeal rather better than I did, commenting only that I should have to change the names of Inspectors Tobler and Lombard, “or there will be even less trade through here than there was formerly.” Thus did Inspector Lombard become Inspector Lestrade. As for Inspector Gregory Tobler, it was the work of an instant to make him Tobias Gregson. Such reasonable criticisms I was bound to respect. If, however, I had anticipated any words of praise or encouragement, any least hint of gratitude, I was doomed to disappointment. I reached for my manuscript, he reached for his violin, and the subject was dropped.