The Autobiography of Sherlock Holmes (3 page)

Unlike my father and brothers, as well as prior Holmes males, all of whom graduated Cambridge, I was admitted to Exeter College, Oxford where I took an undistinguished Ordinary in natural sciences. While my siblings achieved Upper Firsts and Masters Degrees, my largely self-directed studies were outside the academic tolerance of even the progressive leanings of Exonian dons. Fortunately, I competed well at fencing and was tolerated primarily for my ability to excel at foils against Exeter’s sister college, Emmanuel College, Cambridge. I went up to Oxford in October of 1871, and came down in May of 1874. Aside from a skill for fencing, I acquired a working knowledge of organic chemistry, but little else. And, again, unlike my father and siblings, I made no important contacts or friends who would have any lasting importance in my later career. I entered life self-contained and I shall leave it in the same manner. Only three people have penetrated my detachment to be regarded with what may pass for affection but which was, in fact, admiration: Mycroft, Watson and ‘The Woman.’

During the years at Oxford, my time was divided between studies in chemistry at Exeter College and an informal course of eclectic studies in numerous of the other colleges of Oxford. There existed in my mind the idea that I would learn chemistry and other sciences along with abnormal history and human criminology and, by so doing, bring science to bear on criminal activity, a worthy use for a superior intellect in my estimation. And so, I took knowledge from wherever it was to be found; all colleges and all disciplines were fair game for my self-directed education. A morning would find me in the laboratory; an afternoon in the dissecting rooms; evenings in various college libraries reading the history of crime and criminals. An experiment with human blood or enzymes often led me to specialty laboratories at various colleges equipped for specialty analyses and thence to another college’s library with a collection of historical treatises on mass murders, serial deaths or military executions. I viewed all of the colleges of Oxford as being my personal resource for knowledge, a concept that shattered the linear conventions of an institution nearing nine-hundred years of unchanging, insular existence.

It was in my third year at Oxford that the raw elements of deduction were linked for the first time in my brain. The physical observation of wet grass, linked with the chemical knowledge of ash, linked to a unique boot print, linked with the psychological reaction to fear, linked with the analyses of time and distance, linked with geographic certainty of a surrounding neighborhood, all came precisely together to produce a flawless, serial, analytic deduction taking me to a specific room in a specific house where a specific crime was about to take place by a specific criminal with murder aforethought about to occur; and the instantaneous linkage of all those elements into a cohesive and accurate deduction coursed through my brain like lightning, and I emerged another person, forever to be more machine than corporeal.

At that moment, my studies were complete. I possessed the essential knowledge, deductive tools and connective synapses to inhabit the center of the organ of crime and defeat its purposes. My brain was on fire and would burn with a white-hot intensity for decades to follow.

2

There is only one city in the whole of the world that can nourish white-hot intensity: London.

After coming down from Oxford and spending a week at Church Court, I departed on Sunday, 31 May 1874 on the second full moon of the month, for London. My father made over a generous allowance to me for expenses, but I accepted only a small annual stipend of one-hundred guineas from him until I could make my own way.

I chose the British Museum as the centre of my web in order to have access to its vast library and reading room for historical research. Close by also, were the great stations, Covent Garden, and a number of the hospital laboratories wherein my researches were to continue. After only three nights in a boarding house in Holborn, on 4 June I located satisfactory rooms at 47 Montague Street, Bloomsbury, next the Museum to its east, between Russell Square and Great Russell Street. The owner, an antiquarian specializing in Byzantine studies, lived quietly in rooms on the second floor and fitted the ground floor as his extensive library and museum housing his arcania. Mr Arbuthnot let the entire third and fourth floors, furnished, for a quite low rate likely owing to his complete lack of knowledge of the prevailing economics of 1874 due to his oyster-like existence lived almost exclusively in the Byzantine Era, and, having lost the previous tenant to the attractions of opal mining in Australia, had immediate availability on the day I noted his ‘To Let’ sign next the entry. We came to terms and I removed my few belongings to my new lodgings within the day.

Arbuthnot employed a housekeeper-cook, a maid, and a boy-in-buttons to service his and his lodger’s needs and his shop requirements. Arbuthnot was unusual in that, as a young man of twenty-five, whilst serving in a book shop in Great Russell Street, a collapsing book-case fell upon him and rendered him unconscious for a full day due to the blow, affecting the limbic area of the brain. When he awoke, he no longer possessed the sense of smell. He was, for many years, a perfect landlord for a tenant prone to noxious chemical experiments and the near-permanent acrid fog of tobacco smoke above stairs.

And here, in the interest of accuracy, I must begin to clear away Watson’s persistent use of protective red herrings throughout his many narratives of our years together. Watson always feared retaliatory malice from the criminal world, especially as my reputation grew. He wrote consistently and imaginatively of our lodgings at 221B Baker Street and of our landlady-housekeeper, Mrs Hudson. Watson mentioned Montague Street as my former lodgings only once in his description of our first meeting and, subsequently, our taking rooms together at 221B. But, it was not in Baker Street that we shared rooms; it was always 47 Montague Street where I have lived continuously for over fifty-five years and where, for a number of those years, I intermittently shared rooms with Watson. There was no Mrs Hudson. The housekeeper-cook employed by Arbuthnot was Mrs Vestal Hunter to whom Watson attributed all of the gracious qualities of the long-suffering, but fictional, Mrs Hudson. Mrs Hunter, in 1874, was a most capable woman of only twenty-two years of age. Her husband had been tragically killed in a train accident, and she had a daughter, Violet, who went on to be a governess. After Arbuthnot’s death in early 1896, I purchased the Montague Street property from his estate and provided Mrs Hunter with a lifehold on the portion formerly occupied by Mr Arbothnot. She remains housekeeper today, now seventy-seven years old, healthy and quite happy in her spacious ground and first floor rooms. We have provided a cook and maid who care for our respective retirement quarters and modest needs.

The second floor has a large, comfortable sittin-groom facing the street and two smaller rooms at the rear, one that serves as a combination library and study and the other a bedroom with a small en suite. Two large bedrooms on the third floor face the front and the rear with a full en suite between, installed after the Great War. Paralleling the bedrooms to the north is a long lumber-room with a collection of paraphernalia, oddments, costumes, commonplace books, and other flotsam of the years. Meals can be taken in either the sitting-room or the third floor bedroom owing to the convenience of a dumb waiter also installed after the war which connects to the kitchen below stairs. During the Watson years in residence, beginning in 1881, he preferred the third floor rear bedroom overlooking the gardens while I occupied the second floor bedroom adjacent the sitting room, an arrangement that admirably suited my often nocturnal and inconsistent habits. Watson liked his sleep undisturbed. And, it must be said, he was a prodigious snorer and his third floor rear bedroom suited us both.

The only length of time when I did not lodge at 47 Montague Street was the period following on the Reichenbach Falls business when, again as a protective device against retaliation, and as a safeguard against the possible necessity for future hiatuses, Watson described my wanderings on the Continent and beyond in various disguises, but primarily as the diffuse and fictitious Sigerson. Again, accuracy requires a correction. I returned from Switzerland having spent a week hidden in various agricultural wagons crossing France, finally boarding
incognito
one of my family’s coastal freighters at Saint-Nazaire. Two days later, I was safely tenanted as a beekeeper on a small holding in Maiden Wood and passed the years 1889 to 1891 as Colin Fraser, apiast. It was during those bucolic years that I wrote
Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations Upon the Segregation of the Queen
which Beach & Thompson kindly waited publication until 1910 when all danger had passed.

The sitting-room was—and is—largely as described by Watson. The bullet holes remain where I idly placed them; the Persian slipper continues to give service; the old side-board is in its accustomed place; and the coal-scuttle next the fireplace still holds the cigars, pipes and accoutrements of the habitual user of tobacco. Little has changed in the interior furnishings of a life during a long passage of time when, without, all has changed. Here, in my old and familiar rooms, with the thick, yellow fog at the windows illuminated by gas-light, it is always—and always will be—1874.

3

With my nascent web established within the narrow confines of the British Museum and Montague Street, I began extending its threads into four major sectors: crime, police; high society; and commoners. Crime fuelled my enterprise and my bloodlust; the police provided the necessary, ultimate sanctions; high society provided the income; and the commoners provided the variety and perversions of victimisation that stimulated my interests. In total, my ‘organisation’ encompassed the four opiates of evil, good, retribution and reward. And I could pick and choose which strand of my web to tighten and which to relax in order to achieve the stimuli I desired. There were cases where I allowed the criminals to lead the chase; others when I chose the police as the scent hounds; still others where the commoners were the whippers-in; and sufficient other cases where high society was allowed to be the Masters of the Hounds for the benefit of their guineas. All of my cases had one common element: I alone in this entire system of crime, punishment, victimisation and reward possessed the precise and accurate deductive solution owing entirely to my superior intellect and singularly developed skills of observation and reasoning. Mine was the perfect career for a precision brain motivated by a rational ego and the tantalising knife-edge of good and evil. Had my father’s innocent coffee-house conversations with the astro-mathematician during the months at Lake Geneva in 1852 ever grown into an influential mentoring or retainer position with our family for that supreme titan of evil, I could have just as easily supplanted him as the Napoleon of crime and established my web for wholly evil purposes, such are the hair-trigger dualities of my unique powers and singular personality. Fortunately, the bulwark that was Mycroft and the essential Watsonian goodness prevented my experimentation with the dark skills.

Watson did not join me at 47 Montague Street until 15 January 1881, on the cloudless evening of a bright full moon. Within a month, we were involved in the Jefferson Hope murder case which Watson was to call (in response to my suggestion)
A Study In Scarlet
.

There were, however, six and a half years prior to Watson’s association when I lived in my Montague Street lodgings alone. During those unobserved years, from June 1874 to January 1881, I had begun to build my practice and develop my web. The last half of 1874 brought only seven insignificant cases—two burglaries, a missing one-armed chestnut roaster, a Malay sabotage of a Thames barge, an obvious murder of passion, the odd disappearance of four Hansom cabs in one evening, and the one case earning over one-hundred guineas, the return of Lord Sedley’s kidnapped albino Macaw.

The following year, 1875, strengthened my relations with a number of Inspectors of Scotland Yard who became curious as to my powers of observation after I conducted an analysis of a murder scene in Seven Dials leading to the apprehension three hours later of a Punjabi oil renderer from the Norwegian whaling ship
Nordkapp
. I concluded fifteen successful cases that year and two others that were unsuccessful. Actually, both were technically successful in that I solved the crimes, but they were both petty crimes driven by family poverty and I quietly restored the stolen items to the owners and turned a blind eye to the deeds of necessity by these lesser, repentant criminals after delivering a strong warning.

My practice grew in 1876 to twenty-eight cases, half of which were requests for my assistance by five respected Scotland Yard Inspectors. Six cases were engaged by members of London society and earned enough in fees to make the year profitable. Three cases by landed gentry allowed me to increase my account at Capital and Counties Bank to the equivalent of nearly two years of expenses. And one case concerning a peer brought a small reward but a great amount of recognition in the high society quarter of my web. Among the titled of the realm, my name was frequently mentioned in drawing rooms of the great houses in reference to “The Case of the Moonlit Apple.” Perhaps one day it can finally be told, as only one person intimate with the horrors of this old and respected noble family remains alive, albeit irretrievably insane.

By New Year of 1881, my casebook had one-hundred and twenty-three synopses of problems brought to me. These were the cases that pre-dated Watson’s association and our first problem together, the forgery case. Most of these early adventures were simple and unimportant; a few were interesting; one or two were unique; all were essential to creating a reputation allowing me to pluck out of the miasmic effluent of British and European crime a few precious gems that reflected original evil and enormous creative energy. Only vaguely aware of an unseen presence at that time, I was, indeed, preparing for Moriarty.