by Anita Janda
“The photograph?”
“Claire. If you’re from Claire, you must have the photograph. Where is it?”
Light dawned. The wedding photograph was not given me in order that I might identify Abel, but so that Abel might identify me.
“Take me to Claire.” he said. And slid from the bench to the floor.
“It might be easier to sling him over your shoulder, insensible as he is, and rely on the fresh air to revive him.” The whispered words were so exactly what I was thinking myself that it was a shock to realize that they were not mine. Yes, it was Holmes. “He owes the management two bob for the last pipe,” he added helpfully.
I don’t know whether ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ will prove at all suitable for my pen but if so, I certainly have an attention-getting opening for it.
* * *
No word from Holmes, which may mean that he has already solved his case, or it may mean that he is on the verge of abandoning it for lack of evidence. But if his case is solved, why hasn’t he appeared to tell me of his cleverness? And if his case is at a standstill, why hasn’t he arranged to use me as a sounding board in order to clarify his thinking? Last night’s activities didn’t clarify anything.
In disguise, his life probably not worth a brass farthing should he be recognized, the disreputable sailor who was Holmes made ready to quit the Silver Bowl as soon as I arrived to provide an alternate means of passing the evening. It’s not my fault that Abel Hucknell’s condition made that impossible. It may have felt like the hand of fate to Holmes, meeting Watson in an opium den, but I knew it was the hand of Mrs Hucknell that was responsible. “Not now, Watson. Outside. Do you have a cab?” Yes, I had a cab. I needed it for Abel Hucknell.
I secured a second cab for Holmes eventually, but the damage was done. He turned silent on me and I dozed, and all I’m really clear about is that he thinks his client should have lent him a dog-cart if she was going to expect personal progress reports from him on a daily basis. Oh yes, and I have “a grand gift for silence” when I’m sleeping.
It goes against the grain with me to apologize to him for this, but I suppose I’ll have to. At least I can be sure of one thing. “Send the sot home, Watson. We don’t need him.” Nobody could ever mistake Holmes for a married man.
* * *
Success! Holmes has approved ‘The Red-headed League’ (not without argument, as you shall hear, but I got the better of him at last) and —you boon, you!—there is no impediment to my telling the story of ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, always providing I disguise his client sufficiently “to preclude identification by my public.” Ha! I have disguised more than that in my time, and so I told him. Not that he should have needed the reminder. Hadn’t he just finished reading ‘The Red-headed League’?
“It is extraordinary, Watson. Quite the most extraordinary thing you’ve done. And I do not make an exception of that last adventure of yours, that ridiculous ‘Scandal in Bohemia’—which was not set in Bohemia at all, as you’ll recall, but right here in London, divided approximately evenly between the venues of St. John’s Wood and Baker Street. I hardly recognized myself in that one. I do in fact recognize myself in this one, but that’s about all I recognize.”
I spoke soothingly. “The deductive chain, Holmes, is entirely your own. You must have recognized it.”
“Yes, yes, I have already admitted I recognized my own part. The dialogue, the deductive chain, the dénouement. It is the rest of it I’m having trouble with. This Jabez Wilson, this John Clay—I suppose you got his name from the deposits on his trouser knees? I thought so. But why, Watson? You take an ordinary case”—hardly ordinary in my opinion, involving as it did an insatiable shopkeeper, a shop assistant happily working for half wages, a fortune in gold, a bank half a street away behind a vegetarian restaurant, and a tunnel connecting their two cellars—“and then you complicate it. You introduce the most fantastic elements and you expect your readers to believe you. You do recall Dr Mortimer’s observation about the incidence of red hair in Homo sapiens? You must, you couldn’t possibly have missed the import of his remarks, your adventure is by way of being an answer to the good doctor. But what if someone notices the sheer impossibility of the thing? Won’t you feel embarrassed if one of your readers challenges your veracity?”
It was time to introduce a note of reality into the conversation. That is the trouble with all of this scientific accuracy we hear so much about these days—it takes no account of reality.
“One of my readers, challenge my veracity regarding Jabez Wilson’s red hair? I am surprised at you, Holmes. You forget, most of my readers will not have met any of us. Whom do you think the average reader will find it harder to believe in, a red-haired pawnbroker named Jabez Wilson or a consulting detective named Sherlock Holmes?”
His grin—not very practiced—won my point for me. In no time, we were both grinning from ear to ear. Good, I thought. If Holmes could be brought to understand the magnitude of the task I have set myself with these adventures of his, then he might be persuaded to moderate his literary expectations to a more normal level.
“I liked the part about the encyclopaedia,” he offered.
“I thought you might,” I said. I endeavoured to hide my satisfaction. This was not the time to ask him whether he had also enjoyed the scene in the bank or my description of Mr Wilson.
“Do you send a copy to Dr Mortimer?” he asked.
“Of the published version, I think, Holmes.” (I was not about to incorporate Dr Mortimer into my pre-publication gauntlet.) “The Strand is a popular magazine, but unlikely to come his way in the Canary Islands without my assistance.”
“If Dr Mortimer has a fault,” Holmes said thoughtfully, “It is that he is a little limited in his conversation—inclined to be dogmatic in his opinions.”
So much understanding was a heady experience for me. “I will let you know if anyone objects to Jabez Wilson’s red hair or my Red-headed League,” I promised.
“But you do not anticipate it?” he asked. It was still bothering him.
“No, Holmes, I do not anticipate it. I anticipate nothing but praise, this side of the Canary Islands.”
And I gave myself up to the sweet contemplation of its arrival in the Canaries. “You see, Sir Henry, England has not forgotten us.” Indeed we haven’t.
* * *
December marked the appearance of the Mary Sutherland adventure, ‘A Case of Identity’ (which was no adventure for her, poor girl), February, the publication of the Irene Adler story, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’. Did I tell you what Fitsch did about that? He actually sent me a note congratulating me on the quality of my last-minute replacement for ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’. He didn’t know I had it in me, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ was a gem, an absolute gem. It had style, it had grace, it had pathos, it had breadth (whatever that is). Maybe he should always reject my first effort just to see what I can come up with when I put my mind to it, ha ha.
I hope he is going to be similarly enthusiastic when he receives ‘The Red-headed League’—and writes to say so. I am worried about Holmes. I don’t think he was completely convinced by my argument last night. Why must he make everything so difficult? Personally, I don’t think I’m taking any risk with this adventure at all. Dr Mortimer is out of the country, isn’t he? Well, then. I don’t anticipate a single objection this side of the Canary Islands. In fact, I’ll go further and admit (mea culpa) that I am looking forward to the day when Dr Mortimer is riding his hobby-horse hell for leather and is shot down by someone in his audience citing my very own adventure of ‘The Red-headed League’. It could happen. It could!
Memorandum: Never send anything to Mr Fitsch until the last possible moment. And try to keep at least one adventure in reserve in case of unforeseen difficulties such as those which prevented the publication of ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ last month.
I can’t tell you how good it feels to be in a position where I can finally tak
e my own advice. At the present moment, I actually have not one, not two, but three adventures ready and at hand, marked with the seal of Holmes’s reluctant approval. For April, ‘The Red-headed League’. (There is no point in letting Holmes’s permission to publish grow cold and stale in a case like this.) For June, ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’, whose introduction I have just rewritten for the fourth time, hoping to manage an allusion to ‘The Sign of Four’ that will survive Mr Fitsch’s editorial attentions.
The trick is to weave the allusion so tightly into the narrative fabric that Fitsch will find the attempt to excise it to be more trouble than it’s worth. This is not an easy thing to do, as anyone who’s ever made the attempt can tell you. Alternatively, I suppose I could try to make my reference so off-hand and by-the-way that friend Fitsch will miss it altogether. The problem with that approach being that any reference as well hidden as all that is apt to amuse Mr Fitsch no end while it calmly sails past the rest of my readers. But enough about ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’. Either I will see The Sign of Four mentioned in the June issue of the Strand or I won’t, and there’s an end to it. After all, when you come right down to it, there’s nothing I can plant he can’t remove. And nothing on earth I can do about it.
I owe my fifth adventure, like my second, to Sir Henry Baskerville. If he hadn’t broken his heart over Beryl Stapleton, I doubt that Holmes would ever have permitted ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’. As it is, Holmes’s gracious capitulation in the matter of Irene Adler has simplified the situation enormously. I didn’t have to throw myself on his mercy over the February issue, which means our original agreement still stands: ‘The Five Orange Pips’ will be my fifth adventure, appearing in August. Assuming all goes well, October will then see the adventure of Hugh Boone, ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ in print.
It has just occurred to me. My present contract with the Strand expires with the October issue. If I want to see my Christmas story, ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ in print, I shall have to commit myself to writing six more adventures.
Fitsch, you devil!
Chapter 23
If I didn’t mind loose ends and blighted expectations, I would end this diary right here—“Fitsch, you devil!” certainly seems to strike the proper note. Then again, if I didn’t mind loose ends and blighted expectations, I wouldn’t be in this line of work in the first place, turning history into fiction. I owe it all to Mary Sutherland, remember. To Mary Sutherland and a heart that’s easily moved to indignation on behalf of the unsuspecting.
It is a great comfort to me, seeing how well that’s turned out—Mary is in absolute alt over Miss Morrison’s happy ending. “Isn’t it romantic, John? And you thought Dr Stamford was a certified bachelor!" ” Actually, I thought Mr Holmes was the certified bachelor—I thought Stamford was three parts gone and no help for it. I’m glad I was right. Young Stamford is the best of good fellows and Miss Morrison—you may say what you like about Miss Morrison, but I say she deserves her chance at happiness. It cannot be easy playing the lovesick daughter for the sake of a man you no longer love, especially when you know that he is already married, to your mother.
Unlike Hosmer Angel, young Stamford has no interest in Mary Sutherland’s small inheritance. He is smitten with her air of abstraction, her sense of style (did I tell you about her butter-coloured boots?), her “innate delicacy.” Many a happy marriage has begun with less. She in turn is taken with his candour, his courage, his manly devotion. Why are women so much better than we are at focussing on the essentials? It was a stroke of genius on his part, introducing her to his Great-Aunt Gertrude. Nothing could have been in greater contrast to the courtship of Hosmer Angel.
‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ is going splendidly, but whether that is a happy accident (as I suspect) or a sign that I am finally learning how to manage the adventure writing process (as I hope) is anybody’s guess. My attention-getting opening practically wrote itself, and that in spite of the fact that almost none of it could be presented the way it actually happened. Every name, every incident, every telling bit of description had to be reupholstered in the fabric of my imagination before I could use it.
My first duty was to find a new name and create a new family background for the Hucknells. Claire Hucknell is a modern-day saint and I won’t have her embarrassed by my adventure. Abel, too, deserves better of me than that. It will not hurt my story to have me encounter him between pipes in a state bordering on sobriety, able to appreciate his wife’s concern and to cooperate in his own rescue. Should ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ ever come Abel Hucknell’s way, I want him to read it and feel a stiffening of his backbone, not a blow to his pride. Unless I miss my guess, he is going to need all the pride he can lay his hands on if he is to survive his hunger for the smoke.
It actually worked out rather well. By giving him a clergyman for a brother, I was able to speak out about this pernicious habit without sounding at all preachy.
A new name and a small portion of social prominence brought the Hucknells off safely, but it took several tries to achieve the geographical obfuscation of the Silver Bowl. I don’t mind my readers strolling down Baker Street, checking to see whether there is a Number 221, but I’ll be dammed if I’m sending anyone to Upper Thames Street looking for “my” opium den. The trick is to be specific but contradictory as to distance and direction, all the while referring to landmarks which don’t exist. Geographical permutations must be made. Then, of course, I had to go back to Upper Thames Street to make sure I had not inadvertently described the location of some other den of iniquity.
For once, I’ve had no problems with the plot. Of course, when you come right down to it, plot problems are inevitably moral problems. Is this a suitable resolution of that conflict? Can I live with this as one of my stories?
I believe that I have felt morally justified in my approach from the beginning, but there’s no denying I went through a bad patch after Mary Sutherland’s unexpected visit. I still remember the horror I felt as I struggled to remember her name—Sarah Morrison, soon to be Mrs Clive Stamford.
In ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, we have one of those rare but welcome situations where telling the story can only do good in the world. Hugh Boone (not his real name) may have promised the magistrate that he would refrain from his fraudulent if lucrative activities, but there’s no doubt in my mind that exposing his fraud and chicanery in the Strand will go a long way towards assuring that he keeps that promise.
Chapter 24
I don’t know when I am any more. Between backdating my adventures to create the impression of Holmes as a man well established in business and projecting them into the future to create a sense of “presentness” when they are due to appear in print, I have actually published two adventures as having happened at a date that is still in the future.
Holmes thinks it is a great joke. “God help anyone who tries to create a chronology of my career from your adventures, Watson! ‘The Sign of Four’ isn’t even internally consistent. You give the date as July 7th of an indeterminate year and describe December of 1878 as being nearly ten years ago, which any fool can tell you makes the year 1888. May 4th, 1882 is then ‘about six years ago’—so far, so good, Watson—but that date inaugurates an annual pearl inheritance for your Miss Morstan, who has received six pearls by that 7th of July. How is it possible? 1882, 1883, 1884, 1885, 1886, 1887, 1888—she must have seven pearls if the year is 1888. The year must be 1887. 1888. 1887. 1888. That missing pearl is going to cause more headaches to more people…”
Oddly enough, he is not at all disturbed by the 1890 date in ‘The Red-headed League’ and ‘The Five Orange Pips’. No, there he prefers to take the long view: “A hundred years from now, no one will notice the inconsistency, Watson.”
I shall be very surprised if a hundred years from now, anyone is noticing anything. Or if anyone besides Holmes and his brother ever notices the “missing” pearl.
I’m just happy my strategy worked. Mr F
itsch was so certain he didn’t want ‘The Sign of Four’ that I had no qualms about placing it in Lippincott’s magazine, where I was stunned to find that the usual rate was nearly twice that for the Strand. Mr Fitsch and I are going to have to have a little talk before I sign my next contract.
1891
Chapter 25
His name is Moriarty.
Holmes was in that state of feverish excitement that allows of no impediment, a state that in his case is uniformly accompanied by a crystalline purity of vision, wholly focussed on ways, means, and devices. There is no reasoning with him at such times, and I find myself committed to an early morning trip to the Continent for some dark purpose that sounds remarkably like a duel, as difficult as that may be to believe in this day and age. I am to bring my Eley’s No. 2, as usual, and the precautions that must be taken in preparation to my securing a cab for the first part of my journey will occupy a full twenty minutes in what I devoutly hope will be the half-light of a very foggy morning. I have already drafted my note for Jackson, who will be pleased enough at the chance to steal another patient or two.
Mary is another matter.
As is perhaps inevitable at this juncture of our married life, there is not at this time that perfect unanimity of spirit between us that would allow me simply to say that I was with Holmes. Not, at any rate, when we won’t be found firmly ensconced in his rooms in Baker Street, under the watchful eye of Mrs Hudson. The second thing Mary will do is to discover that I have taken the Eley’s or, as Holmes would correct me, “that the Eley’s is missing from its usual place.”
Ten minutes with Holmes and I am unable to have a normal conversation with myself.
One would have to be totally unaware of the hazards of the married state not to realize that what little information I do possess is hardly of the sort to reassure a woman, either of her husband’s truthfulness or of his good sense. Holmes in the gravest danger from a mathematics coach? Holmes involved in two preposterous street accidents in one afternoon, Holmes set upon by bludgeonmen in the evening, Holmes fastening our shutters against air-guns, Holmes fleeing our home by way of the back door, scrambling over our garden wall to vanish into the night? No wife can be expected to understand why this is the time for a little Continental holiday—why this is not a matter for the police. “Be careful, John” hardly seems to cover the situation.