The Perils of Sherlock Holmes (5 page)

“Your bedroom slippers?”

“Yes.” He leaned forwards, placing his palms upon his desk. “They were soaked through, Mr. Holmes, exactly as if I had been walking in snow the whole night.”

This intelligence had a profound effect upon my friend. Face thrust forwards now, his eyes keen and his nostrils flaring, he said, “I must prevail upon Your Lordship to invite Dr. Watson and myself to be your guests tonight.”

The earl frowned—less perturbed, I thought, by the inconvenience of entertaining two unexpected houseguests as by the impropriety of Holmes having made the suggestion himself. “You deem this necessary?”

“I consider it of the utmost importance.”

“Very well. I shall send a messenger to inform my wife.”

“That is precisely what I must ask you not to do. No one must know that we are in residence.”

“May I ask why?”

“Everything depends upon the outward appearance that your nightly routine remains unchanged. I assure you I am not being melodramatic when I say your life is in danger.”

“But of what, Mr. Holmes? By whom?”

Holmes stood, ignoring this reasonable question. “I shall need time to lay my trap. Will it be possible to ensure that Lady Chislehurst and your servants are all away from home this evening between the hours of eight and nine?”

“That should not be difficult. Our cook will have left by then, and our maid is away visiting relatives for the holiday. I shall suggest my wife call upon her friend Mrs. Wesley down the street. She was widowed last spring and faces a lonely Christmas.”

“Excellent. Pray inform her that you are exhausted and will probably have retired by the time she returns. Dr. Watson and I shall be watching from cover. Expect us immediately after she has gone. It is extremely important that you share none of these details with anyone, especially your clerk.”

The earl was plainly troubled, but agreed without further questions, and provided us with directions to his London lodgings, whereupon we moved towards the door. Upon the threshold I turned and said, “I should like to ask Your Lordship a question, a personal one.”

“I have no secrets, Doctor.”

“Is your family name by any chance Cratchit?”

He appeared surprised. “Why, yes, it is. I was born Timothy Cratchit. Did you read that in Brook’s?”

“No, Your Lordship; in Dickens.”

Lord Chislehurst scowled. “That miserable yarn-spinner! I personally have not read his invasive little story, yet I cannot escape from it. Until I entered the nobility I could go nowhere without some new acquaintance hailing me as Tiny Tim, despite having achieved my full growth, and thinking himself quite the clever fellow. I’d have the meddler in court were he still living.”

After we had been shown out of the counting-room by Richard, who seemed a personable sort, well-groomed and -dressed within the limitations of a clerk’s salary, Holmes asked me the meaning of the last exchange.

I was stupefied. “Surely you are familiar with Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’! Every English schoolboy has had the story force-fed to him each December since it made its appearance.”

“I was an uncommon schoolboy, and I haven’t the faintest notion as to what you are referring.”

Briefly, in the hansom on the way back to Baker Street, I summarised that most English of Christmas tales and its unforgettable cast of characters: Ebenezer Scrooge, the miserly, holiday-loathing banker; Bob Cratchit, his long-suffering clerk; Cratchit’s loveable, crippled younger son, Tiny Tim; and the three ghosts who visited Scrooge and brought about his conversion to the season of love and forgiveness. Holmes listened with keen interest.

“I recall telling you once that it is a mistake to imagine that one’s brain-attic has elastic walls, and that the time will come when for every new shipment of information one accepts, another must be sacrificed,” he said when I had finished. “However, I rather think I have an uncluttered corner still, and it seems to me that literature would not be an unwise thing to deposit there. What one man can invent, another can subvert. If you and I are not careful tonight, Watson, your Mr. Dickens may well be an unwitting accomplice before the fact of murder.”

“Whom do you suspect, and what is the motive?”

“Chiefly, I suspect Lady Chislehurst and Richard, the clerk. Whether their alliance is amorous or strictly mercenary has yet to be determined, but I am convinced they are in it together, and that Lord Chislehurst’s estate is their object.”

“But why the clerk? The wife is the sole beneficiary.”

“It was he who planted the suggestion in the earl’s mind which led to his Christmas Present vision of strife in Richard’s household. Our client was not aware of his subordinate’s dire financial situation before their most timely conversation. There is nothing so effective as a little haunting, abetted by an application of strong spirits and combined with a wife’s reminder of one’s fiscal responsibilities to his family, for bringing a man to a contemplation of his mortality, and to the arrangement for the disposition of his worldly goods.”

“Are you suggesting he was mesmerised?”

“I suspect something even more ambitious and diabolical. You may count upon it, Watson, there is skullduggery afoot. I am reminded most acutely of that business at the Baskerville estate during the early years of our association. If there is a ghost involved here at all, it is that blackguard Stapleton’s.”

At this point Holmes fell into a dark reverie, from which I knew from long experience he would not be drawn until the hour of our appointment with our endangered client. As we clip-clopped homeward through those streets laden with snow, the seasonal spirit was significantly absent inside that cab.

Big Ben had just struck eight, and the resonance of its final chime was still in the air when a well-built woman in her middle years bustled out the doorway of an imposing pile not far from Threadneedle Street and started down the pavement wrapped in a heavy cloak. This, I assumed, was Lady Chislehurst; and she had not been out of sight thirty seconds when Holmes and I emerged from the shallow doorway across the street where we had stationed ourselves five minutes previously.

Holmes did not ring the bell right away, but paced the length of the front of the building, swinging his cane in the metronomic manner he often used to measure distance. Presently he climbed the front steps with me at his heels.

The bell was answered almost immediately by our client, whose attire of nightcap and dressing-gown assured us he had followed Holmes’s advice and convinced his wife that he was retiring. Once we were admitted to the rather dark and gloomy foyer, the detective repeated the procedure he had conducted outside, pacing the room deliberately from the left wall to the right.

“An interesting building,” he said when he was standing before the earl once again. “James the First, is it not?”

“James the Second, or so I was told when I acquired it from the Scrooge estate. It was a depressing old place, neglected and in disrepair. Lady Chislehurst has done much to improve it, although much remains to be done. The very first thing she did was to see to it that the hideous old door-knocker was removed. The lion’s head frightened our nieces and nephews when they came to visit.”

“It is admirable of you both to take the trouble to preserve the place. The loss of such an unusually substantial example of architecture would be a great tragedy. There is a difference of six feet in the width of the building between the outside and the inside. One seldom encounters walls three feet thick so far past the medieval period.”

“Indeed. I never noticed.”

“I am always intrigued by how little attention we pay to familiar things, which are to us the most important. May we inspect your chamber?”

We were led up a narrow flight of stairs to a large room on the first floor, equipped with a huge old four-poster bed and a stone fireplace nearly large enough to walk into upright, with a bearskin stretched before it on the hearth. Above the mantel hung a huge old painting in a gilt frame of a medieval noblewoman languishing on the floor of a dungeon, with light streaming down upon her from a barred window high on the wall.

“An outside room,” observed Holmes. “Do you not find it draughty?”

“No; the window was bricked in years ago.”

“Convenient.”

“How so, Mr. Holmes?”

“Darkness, of course. There is nothing less conducive to sleep than an unwanted shaft of light. Is that the corner in which you saw the apparitions? Yes, that is where they would be most visible to someone sitting up in bed. Where is Lady Chislehurst’s chamber in relation to yours?”

“Just down the hall. Do you wish to see it?”

“That won’t be necessary.” He swung upon our host, eyes bright as twin beacons. “Dr. Watson dabbles a bit in Jamesian architecture. Would Your Lordship object to conducting him upon a tour while I complete my inspection? I thought not. Thank you for your hospitality.”

“Curious fellow, your Mr. Holmes,” said the earl when we were in the gaslit hallway outside the room where Holmes could be heard rummaging about. “Is he always this unusual?”

“Usually.”

“Do you know anything at all about Jamesian architecture?”

“Only that it is uncommon to find walls so thick, and I didn’t know that until a few minutes ago.”

He produced two cigars from the pocket of his dressing-gown and gave me one. “Curious fellow.”

“He is the best detective in England.”

We had smoked a third of our cigars when the door opened. Holmes appeared sanguine, as if he had spent the time stretched out upon the bed. “There you are, Watson. Does Your Lordship have a spare bedroom?”

“I have several. Would you and the doctor like to share one, or would you prefer separate quarters?”

“With your permission, we shall share yours. I am suggesting that you sleep in the spare room.”

“Whatever for?”

Holmes smiled and placed a finger to his lips.

“As Dr. Watson has no doubt told you, my methods are my own and I seldom confide them. Pray do as I ask, and do not venture out under any circumstances. By morning I hope to have laid your ghosts to rest.”

“See here, Holmes,” said I when we were alone in the room. “I have known you far too long to accept this nonsense about architecture as an adequate explanation for keeping secrets from me. What were you about while I was out on that fool’s errand?”

My friend had removed his boots and stripped to his shirtsleeves and was making himself comfortable upon the big four-poster. “Forgive me, dear fellow. You know full well my weakness for theatrics. In any case your own mind is too active for you to continue to assist me in these little problems if I fail to occupy it. I have come to depend upon my amusements. What was lightning before Franklin arrived with his kite and key? Merely a pretty display.”

My disgruntlement was only partly relieved by this pedantic apology. “What do we do now?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?!”

“Turn down the lamp, will you? There’s a good fellow.” Whereupon, in the dim orange glow of the lowered wick of the lamp upon the bedside table, he closed his eyes. Within moments his even breathing told me he was asleep.

I did not join him in the arms of Morpheus. Although nothing had been said, I knew from past experience that one of us must remain vigilant, and so I stayed awake in the room’s one chair, feeling the reassuring solidity of my faithful service revolver in my pocket.

At length I heard the front door open and shut, and divined that Lady Chislehurst had returned from her visit. Presently, light footsteps climbed the stairs, paused briefly outside the room as if waiting for some sign of movement from within, whilst I held my breath; then they continued down the hall, where the snick and then the thump of a door opening and closing told me that our client’s wife had returned to her room. Then silence.

The night wore on. The room was chill without a fire, for which I was grateful, as it kept me alert. The shadows thrown by the nearly nonexistent light were monstrous, and in my imagination I peopled them with all sorts of mortal terrors.

I must have dozed, despite the cold, for I was suddenly aware of a pale light in a corner of the room where before there had been only darkness, and I had the impression it had been there for some little time. I started, and reached instantly for my revolver. However, a sudden sharp sibilant from the direction of the bed halted me. Holmes was sitting up, his attention centred on the light in the corner. His profile was predatory in its silver reflection.

As we watched, the light changed, assuming vaguely human shape. Now we were looking at a tall, gaunt figure seemingly wrapped in a cloak as black as the shadows that surrounded it. Its face was invisible in the depths of the cowl covering its head, but its skeletal wrist protruded from a loose sleeve, and as the image shimmered before us, its crooked, bony finger appeared to beckon.

My heart hammered in my breast. Clearly, this was the most frightening phantasm of the three that had been described to us; the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, with its cold, silent promise of a lonely grave for he who encountered it.

“Quick, Watson! The light!”

I hesitated but briefly, then reached over and turned up the lamp. Immediately the ghost vanished. I leapt to my feet, starting in that direction. Holmes, however, moved to the wall adjacent, which contained the huge fireplace. The grate was supported by an enormous pair of andirons of medieval manufacture, one of which he seized by its lion’s-head ornament and pulled towards himself. There was a pause, followed by a grating sound, as of a rusted gate opening upon hinges disused for decades. Then the entire back of the fireplace, which I had assumed to be constructed of solid stone, slid sideways, exposing a black hollow beyond.

“A passageway!” said I.

“I surmised as much from the beginning. You will remember I remarked upon the discrepancy between the inside and outside measurements of the building. Hand me the lamp, and keep your revolver handy. Remove your boots. We don’t want them to know we’re coming.”

I did as directed. Holding the light aloft, Holmes stepped over the grate and into the blackness, with me close upon his heels.