The Secret Diary of Dr Watson

by Anita Janda

  Her question fell on me like the proverbial thunderbolt. I closed my medical journal. “Will you excuse me, Mary? I am in the middle of a very tangled adventure and it is calling me. I will be in my study.”

  The problem with the King of Bohemia’s scandalous predicament has always been that it is not romantic. If that seems like a silly thing to say about a discarded mistress blackmailing her former protector, all I can say is that blackmail is not a romantic subject. Sordid, yes—romantic, no. Thanks to Holmes, there’s plenty of action in the case, with plumber’s smoke rockets, riots in the street, secret compartments, cries of “Fire!,” loyal maids, and impenetrable disguises, but the fact remains that all the plot in the world can’t compensate the reader for an unattractive case of characters. It is absolutely essential that the lady in the case engage the reader’s sympathy, however thoroughly that sympathy may war with our better judgement. We must want the lady to win, and not merely because we so dislike the gentleman. It would help immeasurably if someone in the story, someone actually on the scene as it were, evinced a strong admiration for the lady, so that we might follow that character’s lead with our own admiration, our own loyalty. But who? I can’t do it, I’m a married man. That has been the sticking point for this adventure for months. In all that time, I never once thought of Holmes. That just shows you, doesn’t it?

  Let us review the situation. The discarded mistress is in a difficult position—and we must be made to feel the difficulty of it. She is without hope of any mitigation of her circumstances—and this must be seen to be a consideration. (Yes, I can do that.) She is young and beautiful, and she has the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes ranged against her. She is helpless before him—or is she? Oh, I will have my readers sitting on the edge of their seats for Irene Adler!

  Speaking of which, “Irene Adler” was certainly an inspired choice. It is a beautiful name, a beautifully believable name. Little did I know how important this name would be when I referred to her ladyship in the introductory section of ‘A Case of Identity’. I shudder to think how easily I might have kept the original or fixed on something even less suitable: “Trina Fiedler,” for example. It would be impossible to believe that a Trina Fiedler or an Eileen Sadler could be an opera singer from the backwoods of New Jersey, with a voice to make the heavens weep and a face and figure to rival—well, let us just say, a face and figure to rival her rivals’. Talk about killing two birds with one stone! By the time I’ve finished with Irene Adler, Holmes won’t recognize the old harridan.

  There is an element of poetic justice in all of this that appeals very strongly to me. After all, I know Holmes very much better than Mary does. In fact, Mary hardly knows him at all. Of the two of us, it makes sense that I should be the one to present him with his heart’s desire. We shall want none of her Nora Nelligans or Pamela Lampleys after this! If my friend Holmes has a taste for fallen women, the cast-off consorts of foreign kings, that is a taste that Mary cannot very well attempt to supply. She must retire from the field. But stay a moment—what am I to make of Miss Adler’s final capitulation? So farcical of her to leave the wrong photograph behind, in order that the King might have something to remember her by, when (as she well knew) all he wanted to do was to forget her.

  The ending needs work, I can see that. The title, on the other hand, is perfect. Not even Holmes can fault ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’. It’s so clearly a reference to the Bohemian stratum of society. Who would dare to imagine that this really happened to the King of Bohemia, of all places? And yet it did.

  Before I forget: Holmes vetted ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ for accuracy yesterday and it passed with flying colours. That is to say, it was not too accurate. I packed it off to Mr Fitsch on the instant. Theoretically, that means that I have two months to polish ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ to its final form. Personally, I’ll be surprised if I last a week without showing it to him.

  * * *

  Snatching twenty minutes and a couple of sandwiches before I begin my rounds of those too ill to attend me in my surgery: six households tonight, perhaps twice as many by the end of the week. Last month, no one had the influenza. Last week saw a few isolated cases. This week, it seems that half of London is laid by the heels. There was a damfool editorial in the Times today, too, discussing the outbreak in terms of Darwin’s evolutionary principle of survival of the fittest. Darwin was writing about the origin of species, not the death of some poor Granny in Paddington! If I had the time, I’d stop that foolishness with a few well-chosen words of my own. Too tired to do that now. Up half the night working on ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’. Strike while the iron is hot, they say. Besides, if this epidemic blooms the way they say it will, I’m not going to have a moment to myself. So far, Anstruther’s practice seems to be harder hit than mine. I see him starting his day earlier and ending it later than I have had to do.

  Odd how often it’s the young who die of it. They nurse an elderly parent through the crisis, perhaps a child or two, and just when everybody seems to be on the mend, they take it themselves and rapidly go from bad to worse. It’s as if they had used up whatever reserves of strength they had before taking the illness.

  Not that I look for anything like that this evening. It’s early days yet, none of my families is too badly hit. Mostly I see people pulling together in time of trouble, relatives lending a hand, neighbours helping neighbours. That won’t last, of course, it never does, but it warms the heart whenever and wherever I meet with it. More tomorrow.

  * * *

  I have finished it: ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, and I am better pleased with it than I can say. Unless I am very much mistaken, it is superior in style and execution even to ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’, and that is saying something. I will fight for this one. Let Holmes try to tell me that the title could be improved or the casting adjusted. (I take my plots from life, he cannot touch me there.) Sometime during the dark reaches of the night, I was visited by one last inspiration—in response to which, I have dated the incident back two years and placed myself under a pledge of secrecy only recently raised. Let Mary chew on that thought for awhile.

  The case is about as airtight as one poor writer could make it. I have taken care not only to marry the lady off, thus putting her forever out of his reach (I am taking no chances that Mary will attempt to locate the lovely Miss Adler for my friend Holmes), but also to place him at the wedding itself as an impromptu witness. There is no getting around that. Impossible to believe that Sherlock Holmes could be taken in by a mummery; the lady must be well and truly married. I then sent the happy couple out of the country for an extended honeymoon on the Continent. Who knows where they are today? I don’t. Mary will be so understanding, so solicitous of his broken heart, so touched that he could ask the King for her photograph. It is the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. There won’t be a dry eye in the house. Holmes must enjoy the humour of it.

  You know, it is no mean feat to have invented a plausible past for my friend Holmes, a romantic past that I may reasonably hope will serve him in lieu of the domesticated future Mary otherwise has in store for him.

  In a way, it is a great pity no one but Holmes will ever know what I’ve done for him.

  Chapter 17

  He doesn’t like her.

  It was positively the last thing I had ever thought to hear. What’s not to like? “What possible objection can you have to her?” I asked him. “She’s a fictional character! She sings, she dances, she had the King of Bohemia at her feet. All of the men in the neighbourhood go in awe of her. She is an opera singer, retired from the stage, slender enough for breeches parts. An American, with Continental polish—I made sure you would like that. You can give her any face you want, Holmes. What possible objection can you have to her?” I had Godfrey Norton, bachelor, throw up a promising career as a barrister with chambers in the Inner Temple in order to marry Miss Adler, knowing her history. What more does he want?

  Don’t tell me he’s upset beca
use she overlooks him as a possibility! He can’t be as unreasonable as all that, can he? Surely not even Holmes can be as unreasonable as all that.

  Irene Adler is the picture of refined gentility. Holmes appears before her in the guise of an out-of-work groom, pickled in stout and tobacco, probably tubercular, and almost certainly a slave to demon drink. Meanwhile, there is a successful lawyer already on the scene, with a full moustache under his perfect aquiline nose (Holmes’s nose is not at all distinguished) and a special license in his pocket, ready to whisk her away from all of this unpleasantness as his lawfully wedded wife.

  Why should Irene Adler, the daintiest trick in shoe leather for miles around, take His Horseyness into account? She’d be bound to see him, if she saw him at all, as a potential housebreaker rather than as a potential suitor. Didn’t he spend his day examining her ground-floor window locks? Didn’t he way, “Thank you, mum,” when she tipped him a penny for handing her out of her carriage?

  What does he expect me to do? I put in the fire trick right enough, he can have no objection to that, he saw himself it doesn’t work in real life. People don’t rush about, calmly securing their valuables in times of crisis. They grab whatever’s handy and rush out into the street with it. I saw it myself, with him: one clock, a vase of flowers, and a tureen of soup. Now that we know it doesn’t work, surely I am free to use it in my adventure—I’m not giving away any valuable secrets with this one. What does he want from me?

  “Did you see the obituary column in today’s Times, Watson? John Turner is dead.”

  And what if he is? I can’t release ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ for his family to read on the way home from his funeral. A decent interval has to elapse. Say, six months.

  “This arrived this afternoon,” he told me. I looked sharply at him, but as usual with Holmes, to no purpose. His face keeps its secrets.

  It was a letter, from Alice Turner—one I thought at first she must have written before her father’s body was fairly cold. I was wrong. She had written it while he still lay dying.

  The old reprobate! It was a plea for information and it was addressed to Holmes.

  4 January, 1889

  Dear Mr Holmes,

  It is now seven months since you were kind enough to come to Boscombe Valley to assist Inspector Lestrade in his investigation into the mysterious death of our neighbour, Mr McCarthy, with an eye to the eventual release of his son, James, from all suspicion in that regard. Perhaps Mr Lestrade did not make that part clear to you—I realize, of course, that he never fully believed in James’s innocence. But you, Mr Holmes! You offered us hope from the beginning. Why, it was exculpatory evidence of your production that led to James’s release at the autumn Assizes.

  My father tells me I do not understand business—that you, Mr Holmes, are a private enquiry agent, with no more serious loyalty than to the man or men who have hired you. Is that true? Oh, Mr Holmes, do you know of any reason why I should not pledge myself to marry James? My father has this afternoon in the extremity of his suffering (which it is terrible to see), wrung from me a promise to the effect that I will not engage myself to marry the man who killed Charles McCarthy.

  He has dinned it into my head that your departure from the scene was in consequence of your discovery that James was in very fact the murderer—that, under the circumstances, you could do no more toward exonerating him of his crime than to point to whatever bits and pieces of material evidence at the scene of Mr McCarthy’s sad demise might be twisted and turned to divert suspicion in sympathy to your client’s cause. Is that what happened, Mr Holmes? My father says it stands to reason. Else why should you have concealed your own suspicions of the murderer? You have named no other man, offered no other explanation, spun no alternative theory of the crime. You appeared among us for the space of several days, dispensed reassurances with a prodigal hand, and retired to the metropolis once more, where you have preserved your silence and your opinion from any stain of popular judgement.

  I do not well know what I am saying, Mr Holmes. But I beg of you—if you have any least encouragement to offer my hopes of happiness, I should be forever in your debt.

  Distractedly,

  Miss Alice Turner

  Boscombe Valley Hall

  Never have I been able to read a document through to its conclusion in Holmes’s presence.

  “You will notice that I stand accused of two mutually exclusive offenses,” he said. “Perhaps I didn’t understand what it was I was hired to do: Lestrade did not explain things properly. Alternatively, perhaps I understood precisely what it was I was hired to do and did it. I am not certain which of these two prospects pleases the young lady less. Would you care to venture an opinion?”

  I ran my eyes over the remainder of the letter, wondering wherein lay the mystery. The young lady, Miss Turner (why can he never remember their names?), was beside herself over the realization that unless and until some other party was accused of the slaying of Charles McCarthy, suspicion would continue to hover over young James. James was with his father shortly before the fatal attack; they were quarreling; he was discovered cradling the dying man in his arms, muttering broken words of comfort; when questioned by the authorities, he had nothing to say for himself beyond a ritual protest of his innocence. Half the amount of circumstantial evidence would excite public opinion against him.

  By now, Miss Turner knew just how much the dismissal of the charges at the Assizes had done to quell the local reaction—not much, I’ll be bound. The extensive investigative efforts of Sherlock Holmes and company, imported at considerable expense from the metropolis for this grim occasion, had failed to produce the name of a second suspect and the deathbed promise exacted by her father had confirmed the intolerable nature of her situation. No doubt young James is finally behaving as a suitor, too—a development which would have been gratifying in the extreme in any circumstances less trying than these.

  If I were to venture an opinion, it would be that what rankled most was her father’s claim that she did not understand business. Miss Turner must be delivered from the sensation of being enmeshed in secret social conventions. I know what that is like. The occasions that can recall my Army days to my mind are indeed striking in their diversity.

  “Will you let me handle this?” I asked, returning the letter. (Foolish question!)

  “Willingly,” said Holmes, handing it back to me.

  All in all, it was a typical visit to my old rooms in Baker Street. I arrived at eight o’clock believing I was an adventure to the good with Irene Adler and ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, and I made my exit thirty minutes later knowing it was no such thing, burdened with an unrelated writing assignment: ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’. Again. I expect I shall have a fair amount of rewriting to do to fit the narrative to this special case.

  It goes without saying that I was unable to think of a way to suggest to Holmes that in the light of this further service of mine, he might without undue generosity, reconsider his position on the matter of Irene Adler and ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’. Given how he feels about it, I can’t even show it to Mary.

  Chapter 18

  I shouldn’t have inflicted another adventure on him so soon after ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’. That’s what Mary tells me. At another time, in another place, knowing that another deadline was upon me, he might have been more understanding. More tolerant. Sometimes Mary positively astounds me with her wisdom—what she would call her “motherwit.” How can she possibly see all this and still believe Holmes to be in need of a wife? To say I do not understand it is to understate the case by a wide margin, believe me. Ever since ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ was ruled out of court, I have felt like a fly trapped in a web of misunderstanding, a web from which no effort of mine can possibly extricate me.

  “Never mind,” said Mary. “You have two months to persuade Mr Holmes to your point of view and I have two friends I wish you to meet. They are coming to tea this afternoon: Jane Purchase and Elizabeth Tarra
nt. Seed cake today, John. Mind you’re on time.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  I wonder whether Mary could possibly be right about this—about ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, I mean. The question is, can I hope to raise this adventure for reconsideration at a later date or have I with my poor sense of timing, managed only to put it beyond the pale? Certainly, my timing was poor. In my eagerness to get an adventure ahead of myself (and the ubiquitous Mr Fitsch), I completely lost sight of the fact that for Holmes, the press of external circumstance is practically essential for acquiescence. How could I have been so foolish? Holmes won’t even get dressed in the morning without a good reason!

  Holmes prides himself on rising to the dramatic occasion and does everything in his power to heighten the sense of alarm permeating his cases. He thrives on excitement, looks for it, relishes it, and actually seeks to manufacture it when he can get it in no other way. He uses it to stimulate his deductive powers. My mutely enquiring face acts as a goad. How could someone with that emotional constitution possibly understand the medical temperament? They are diametrically opposed. Unlike Holmes, I look always for the space in the clearing where I can go to hear myself think. By temper, training and experience, I value the ability to take emergencies in my stride, with a becoming lack of fanfare. The entire medical profession rests on the efficacy of a lengthy preparation for a barrage of crises whose general dimensions can be gauged and analyzed in advance. I want method, I want peace, I want formulae—a prearranged response to an anticipated demand. Of course Holmes reacted badly. How could he help it? He probably thinks that if he waits until my deadline is upon me, I will pull another and to him, possibly more congenial adventure out of my files. He seems to have my files confused with a bottomless pit. I suppose it is inconceivable to him that I might do my best work while my deadline is yet some weeks away. After all, it is not as though he’d found my last effort entirely to his taste.