The Perils of Sherlock Holmes (4 page)

Throughout our surveillance, we did not converse beyond the necessary. Curious as I was to learn what we were about, experience had taught me the folly of trying to draw Holmes out on the details of his plans.

Towards late afternoon, a catch in Holmes’s breath aroused me from the stupefaction of boredom. His hand closed firmly upon my near wrist. I noted then a youngish man approaching.

He was in need of a haircut and wore a shabby overcoat, but his bearing betrayed breeding. His hair colouring and blue eyes, shot through at that early hour with the ensanguination of strong drink, matched the description Burton had given us of James Patterson, the disinherited son of one of the heroes of Roarke’s Drift.

I grasped the handle of my pistol, but was prevented from drawing it out by a quick squeeze of Holmes’s hand. Thus we stood unmoving as Burton’s late assistant climbed the steps and entered the post office.

Leaning close, Holmes whispered in my ear.

“If he should emerge carrying a parcel, we shall follow him until we’re clear of these other fellows. He may have friends among them. Be prepared, upon my signal, to step in close and press your revolver against his ribs. Discreetly, I beseech you; a day at the Assizes to answer a charge of robbery by a passing patrolman may undo a lifetime of respectable behaviour.”

An eternity seemed to pass before Patterson reappeared. In truth it was not quite five minutes. He sauntered down the steps, considerably lighter on his heels than he had seemed on the way up. Beneath his right arm, clutched as tightly as if it contained the treasure of the Tower, rode a brown paper–wrapped parcel no larger than an officer’s toilet kit.

As directed, I fell in beside Holmes and we trailed the young man at a distance of fifty yards until we were well quit of the crowd outside the post office. Then we picked up our pace, and an instant before the sound of our approaching footsteps must alert Patterson to our presence, Holmes cried, “Now, Watson! Sharp!”

I stepped in quickly, thrusting my weapon’s muzzle through the material of my coat pocket against Patterson’s side, just as he turned. He seemed to recognise the feel of the tempered steel, for he tensed. At that same instant, the detective circled round in front of him. His eyes were bright.

“Your game is done, Patterson! My friend is no stranger to the hazardous life, and will not hesitate to fire if you offer him no choice. The parcel, if you please.” He held out a hand.

The young man wet his lips noisily. “Is it a hold-up, then?” asked he, loudly.

“Were I you, I would not seek to summon police help, however clumsily. It would be the word of a disgraced son against a knight of the realm.” Holmes’s tone was withering in its contempt.

The tension went out of Patterson like wind from a torn sail. He surrendered the parcel.

Instinctively I stepped back a pace, widening my field of fire, whilst Holmes tore away the coarse brown paper. Within seconds he had exposed a box covered in black fabric, with a round opening on one side encircled by shining steel.

“A marvelous invention, the Kodak,” said he, extricating a square brown envelope from the wrapping. “It makes every man a Louis Daguerre, without the expense of maintaining a processing laboratory. One has but to snap away until the rolled film is exposed, then send the camera to the company headquarters in America, where it is opened, the film is developed, and camera and pictures are returned by the next post. With the aid of Mr. Fulton’s equally marvellous steamship, a British subject can expect to view the results within a month.”

As he spoke, Holmes drew a sheaf of glossy photographic paper from the envelope, and there on that scrofulous street in modern London, we three gazed upon page after page of writing which few men had laid eyes on since before the fall of Rome.

Sir Richard Burton, seated at one of the desks in his study in a worn fez and an equally venerable dressing-gown of heavy Chinese silk, shuffled through the photographs like a seer reading the Tarot. His predatory eyes were bright.

“The bounder’s a passing good photographer, thank the Lord for that,” said he. “Shot ten pages at a time, and with some enlargement and the help of a good glass, I should be able to decipher them all. How in thunder did you work it out?”

“His brief infatuation with the Kodak stood out against the indolent portrait you painted,” Holmes said. “When you referred to his trips to the corner post office, the thing was fairly settled for me. What interest can a disinherited man, recently dismissed and without prospects, have in the post? I withheld my suspicions until I could examine the vicinity where the theft took place. The scrap of parchment near the hearth, and the missing camera, eliminated any other theory which might have proposed itself.”

“You have rescued history.”

“Tish-tosh. I have merely saved you the price of Patterson’s extortion. He would almost certainly have approached you with the pictures, as you surmised. In any case, the credit is as much Watson’s as mine. You’d have done well to have so nimble a companion in Africa.”

“If I’d had you both, I’d have tracked the blasted Nile to its cradle,” he grumbled. “You let Patterson go?”

“I thought it best the record of Tutankhamen’s tomb remain with you than in the evidence room at Scotland Yard. I did him no service. Eventually he will commit a crime for which no one can or will absolve him.”

Burton studied each photograph in turn a second time. At last he set them down and rose, offering Holmes his hand. “I wish I’d known you in ’60.”

“You would not have found me diverting company, Sir Richard. I was six years old.”

The case which I have indulged myself so far as to call “The Adventure of the Arabian Knight” has shed more light upon the singular methods of Sherlock Holmes than upon the undefiled resting-place of an Egyptian Pharaoh. Twenty-six months after the events herinfore described, Sir Richard Burton died, a victim of a combination of ailments he’d contracted during his many explorations into places which before him were unknown to white society. His loss was regretted in some quarters, celebrated in others. History, in which he placed so much store, will determine whether he was a serious scholar or a reckless adventurer bent only on sensation.

In order to protect her late husband’s reputation from malicious gossip connected to some manuscripts she found morally objectionable, Lady Isabel Burton burned most of his voluminous papers. Among them, it must be concluded, since nothing has since been heard of them, were the photographs James Patterson took of the Egyptian document and any notes Burton may have made subsequent to their recovery. In view of this calamity, it seems likely that King Tut’s tomb will remain forever buried beneath the sand of many centuries.

John H. Watson

10 May 1904

“C
ompliments of the season, Watson. I note Lady Featherstone retains her childhood infatuation with you. She thinks you twelve feet tall and two yards wide at the shoulders.”

Scarcely had I entered the ground floor at 221B Baker Street and surrendered my outerwear to the redoubtable Mrs. Hudson when I was thus greeted by Sherlock Holmes, who stood upon the landing outside the flat we’d shared for so long. He wore his prized old mouse-colored dressing-gown, and his eyes were brighter than usual.

“Good Lord, Holmes,” said I, climbing the stairs. “How could you know I saw Constance Featherstone this morning? Her invitation to breakfast was the first contact I have had with her since the wedding.”

“You forget, dear fellow, that I know your wardrobe as well as your wife does. I can hardly be expected not to notice a new muffler, particularly when it bears the Dornoch tartan. You told me once in a loquacious humour of your early romance with Constance Dornoch. Who but she would present you with such a token in honour of the holiday? And who but a sentimental lady who still thought you taller and broader than the common breed of man would knot one so long and bulky that it wound five times round your not inconsiderable neck and stood out like the oaken collar of a Mongolian slave?”

I simply shook my head, for to remark upon my friend’s preternatural powers of observation and deduction would be merely to repeat myself for the thousandth time. Ensconced presently in my old armchair in the dear old cluttered sitting-room I knew so well, I accepted a glass of whisky to draw the December chill from my bones and enquired what he was up to at present.

“Your timing is opportune,” said he, folding his long limbs into the basket chair, where with his hands resting upon his knees he bore no small resemblance to an East Indian shaman. “In ten minutes I shall hail a hansom to carry me to an address on Threadneedle Street, where I fully expect my fare to be paid by the Earl of Chislehurst.”

I nodded, not greatly impressed, although Lord Chislehurst was a respected Member of Parliament and a frequent weekend guest at Balmoral, and whispered about as the Queen’s favoured candidate for Minister of Finance. In the hierarchy of Holmes’s clients, which had included a pontiff, a Prime Minister of England, and a foreign king, a noble banker placed fairly low. “A problem involving money?” I asked.

“No, a haunting. Are you interested?”

I responded that I most certainly was; and ten minutes later, my friend having exchanged his dressing-gown for an ulster, warm woollen muffler, and his favourite earflapped travelling cap, we were in a hansom rolling and sliding over the icy pavement through a gentle fall of snow. Vendors were hawking roast chestnuts, and over everything, the grim grey buildings and the holiday shoppers hurrying to and fro, bearing armloads of brightly wrapped packages, there had settled a festive atmosphere which transformed our dreary old London into a magical kingdom. In two days it would be gone, along with Christmas itself, but for the moment it lightened the heart and gilded it with hope.

“The earl is not a fanciful man,” explained Holmes, holding on to the side of the conveyance. “A decade ago he acquired a money-lending institution teetering on the precipice of ruin and within a few short years brought it to the point where it is now universally thought of as one of the ten or twelve most reliable banking firms in England. Such men do not take lightly to ghosts.”

I could divine no more detail than this, as very soon we pulled up before a gloomy old pile which I suspected had shown no great ceremony in its construction under George III, and to which the lapse of nearly a century and a half had brought little in the way of dignity or character. It seemed a most unlikely shelter for the institution Holmes had described.

Lord Chislehurst, to whom we were shown by a distracted young clerk, ameliorated to a great extent this disappointing impression. Well along in his fifties, he had yet a youthful abundance of fair hair, with but a trace of grey in the side whiskers, and the gracefully swelling abdomen that instilled confidence in those who would trust their fortunes to the care of one so well fed, contained in a grey waistcoat and black frock coat. His broad face was flushed and his manner cordial as he exhorted us to make ourselves comfortable in a pair of deep leather chairs facing his great desk. I noticed as he made his way round to his own seat that he walked with a pronounced limp.

“I am doubly honoured, Dr. Watson, to welcome you to my place of business,” said he, leaning back and threading his fingers together across his middle. “I have read your published accounts of Mr. Holmes’s cases with a great deal of interest. As a writer, you may be intrigued to learn that my father toiled for many years as a clerk in the counting-house you came through just now.”

“You have done well for yourself,” I said truthfully.

“So my father might say. Despite the hardship, he was a jovial man, and would laugh long and loud to see his youngest child making free with the cigars in this office.” He helped himself to one from a cherrywood box upon the desk and proffered the rest, but we declined.

“Hardship?” prompted Holmes.

“The former owner was a fierce old ogre in his time, and pinched the halfpenny till it shrieked. Changed quite a bit in his last years, though, I’ll be bound; saw the light, I suspect, as Judgement neared. His generosity to his employees after that made it possible for Father to arrange an operation that saved my life. I was a sickly child—a cripple, in fact. Unfortunately, the old banker overdid himself in the largesse department, and wound up sacrificing those same sound business principles that made him wealthy. His fortunes declined even as mine ascended. He died in debt, and I acquired the firm the very week I entered the Peerage.”

Holmes lit a cigarette. “An inspiring story, Your Lordship. Your letter—”

“The tea is not always sweet,” he interrupted. “I had hoped to move the offices to more suitable quarters down the street next spring, but this South African mess has got all our foreign securities tied up. Against my better judgement, I have been forced to cancel this year’s employee gratuities.”

“Your letter mentioned a ghost.”

“Three ghosts, Mr. Holmes. As if one were not sufficient.” Our host’s genial smile had vanished. “I have been visited by them the past two nights, and I must say it’s getting to be a dashed nuisance.”

“What happened the first night?”

“I was not greatly alarumed by it, thinking the business a bad dream caused by exhaustion and overindulgence. That day had been long and frustrating, beginning with more bad news from Africa in the
Times
, and complicated by a discrepancy in the accounts totalling forty-two pounds, which required that the transactions of the entire week be gone over with a weather eye by everyone on the staff. When the error was finally discovered and the correction made, the hour was well past seven. As is my wont, I stopped at the tavern round the corner on my way home, where I confess I had rather more than my customary tot of sherry. My wife, recognising my condition at the door, put me to bed straightaway.

“I slept as one dead until the stroke of one, at which time I awoke, or thought I awoke, with the realisation that I was not alone in my chamber.”

“One moment,” interrupted Holmes. “You do not share sleeping quarters with your wife?”

“Not since the early months of our marriage. I often sleep fitfully, with much tossing and muttering, and my wife is a light sleeper. I prefer not to disturb her. Is it significant?”

“Perhaps not. Please proceed.”

“‘Who is there?’ I asked groggily; for I was aware of a shimmering paleness in a corner of the room that was usually dark, as of a shaft of moonlight reflecting off a human face.

“‘The Ghost of Christmas Past,’ came the reply. The voice was most solemn but youthful, and very much of this earth.

“‘Whose past?’ I demanded. ‘Who let you in?’”

“‘Your past,’ said the shade; and then some rot about coming along with him.”

Holmes, settled deep in his chair with his lower limbs stretched in front of him and his eyes closed, said nothing, listening. His cigarette smoked between his fingers. As for myself, I felt my brow wrinkling. The narrative had begun to sound familiar.

“The rest is quite personal,” the earl continued. “Vivid memories of my childhood, Christmas dinner with my mother and father and my brother Peter and my sister Martha, and Father going on about a goose, and what-have-you. Obviously I was dreaming, but I had the distinct impression of having travelled a great distance, and that I was peeping at all this as through a window, with the Ghost of Christmas Past standing at my elbow. It was all very strange, but nice, and sad as well. My parents are dead, my sister married and gone to America, and my brother and I have not spoken in years. We quarrelled over our meagre inheritance. I suppose it is not unusual to feel wistful over the happier days of youth. Still, it was an odd coincidence.”

Holmes opened his eyes. “How was it a coincidence?”

“I had spent much of that trying day shut up with Richard, my chief clerk, going over the accounts. When at length the discrepancy I mentioned was identified and corrected, it seemed natural to invite him to join me in a glass of sherry at the tavern. He accepted, and we whiled away a convivial evening reminiscing about Christmasses old and new. So it seems odd that I should dream about the very same thing that night.”

“Not at all, Your Lordship,” I put in. “Man is a suggestible creature. It would be far more unusual to dream about something that was not in one’s mind recently.”

“I think there is something in what you say, Doctor. Certainly it would help to explain the second part of my dream.” The Earl lit a fresh cigar, apparently forgetting the one he had left smouldering only half-smoked in the tray on his desk. “It seems I returned to my bed, for again the clock struck one and I found myself as I had previously, staring at a phosphorescence in the corner and asking what was there.

“‘The Ghost of Christmas Present,’ responded a most remarkable voice, jolly and full of timbre, as of a man in the fullness of his middle years. Just this, and again the summons to come along.

“Now we were standing outside the window of a tiny flat in the City, witnessing what appeared to be a serious row between a young husband and his wife over money; something about not having sufficient funds to settle their bills, let alone celebrate the holiday. At the tavern, Richard had told me of a number of financial setbacks they had suffered because of unforeseen emergencies, but I had not perceived how serious the situation was until that moment. It appeared to threaten their union.”

“Had you met his wife?” Holmes asked.

“I have not had that pleasure. However, he keeps a photographic portrait of her at his desk. She is most comely.”

“Women generally are, in photographs. What happened when the clock again struck one?”

Lord Chislehurst permitted himself an arid smile. “I should have been disappointed had you not seen the pattern. This phantom, who indicated through gestures that he was the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, was the most unsettling of all, and the picture he showed me of some future Yuletide was bleak and hideous. I saw Richard’s home broken, his wife, stigmatised by divorce, forced to make her living from the streets, even as Richard pursued a bitter and lonely existence as an unloved and aging bachelor. Worse, I saw my own neglected grave. Evidently I had gone to it without obsequy, my harsh and penurious business practices having ruined lives and left none to mourn my passing.” He shuddered.

Holmes finished his cigarette. “In your waking moments, My Lord, are you given to dwelling morbidly upon the subject of your future demise?”

“Never. I regard it as an inevitability, which to brood over is to squander what little life we have. This was what I told Lady Chislehurst when she brought up the subject of my last will and testament.”

“Indeed?” Holmes lifted his brows. “Did this discussion take place before or after your dream?”

“Before. That very night, in fact. When I was late coming home from the tavern, she entertained various concerns over what might have befallen me, as wives will. When I arrived at last, she expressed relief, then scolded me as I was preparing to retire that I should be more careful, as the streets are not safe at night for a man not in full possession of his wits, and that if I insisted upon placing myself in jeopardy I should make arrangements for the division of my estate before some footpad separates me from my watch and my life.”

“A practical woman.”

“Very much so. It is the quality which drew my attention to her in the first place. I met her when she came to work for me as a typist. Her suggestions for the improvement of the firm were inspired, and as she was of good family I soon realised that she was the woman to bring order to my existence away from the office. We were married within a year. From time to time, when the firm is shorthanded due to illness or personal emergency among the staff, she still comes in to help out.”

“I assume she works well with Richard.”

“They make an ideal team. Often I have seen them in conference, with many nods and expressions of agreement. But what has this to do with my ghosts?”

“Probably nothing. Perhaps everything. Let us return to this will. Were you persuaded to make it out?”

“My solicitor was in this morning. I signed the documents and Richard witnessed my signature. My wife is chief beneficiary, and Richard is executor; he is a reliable man, and the fee will come in handy should his financial difficulties continue.”

“I commend Your Lordship upon his generosity. You had the dream again last night?”

“Yes, and I’m not certain it was a dream. I was cold sober, having gone straight home from the office without stopping at the tavern, and retired at a decent hour. A cup of tea with Lady Chislehurst before bed was my only indulgence. I shall not repeat myself, for the visitations were the same, including the redundant striking of the hour of one upon the clock, the shades of Christmasses Past, Present, and Yet to Come, and the visions which accompanied them. This time, however, it was all much more vivid. I awoke this morning with the conviction that it had all been true. And there was something else, Mr. Holmes: the condition of my bedroom slippers.”