The Seventh Bullet (6 page)

On a small mahogany butler’s table a glass of sherry awaited each of us, but Mycroft’s coldness was not thawed by the wine’s consumption. After a few halfhearted pleasantries, Holmes announced to me the change in our plans.

“Watson, it would appear that you will have to make the initial part of our trip to New York on your own,” he said.

The rain pelting the lone window in the room punctuated his statement with finality. The intimidating thought of undertaking so great a journey and so major an investigation by myself was obviously reflected in my open-mouthed expression.

“Come, come, Watson. I’ll be joining you as soon as I can. But after some brotherly prodding, Mycroft has presented me with information on the Phillips matter that cannot be ignored.”

I looked at Mycroft who was now impassively leaning an elbow on the marble mantel.

“Mycroft,” his younger brother cajoled, “be so good as to fill Watson in on the history of some of the principals in this story.”

“Very well, Sherlock, although I have already told you that I
believe the less mentioned of this affair the better.”

Holmes nodded. “Please, begin,” he said.

“This Goldsborough chap,” Mycroft said in short bursts that made speaking seem like an exertion he preferred to avoid, “quite an interesting fellow, really. From a good Washington family. Father’s a doctor. He himself was a musician. A violinist. Once played in the Pittsburgh Symphony. Quite a temper, I’m told. Broke his violin over the pate of someone who didn’t like his poetry. For all Goldsborough’s sins, one hopes that he might serve as a model as far as Sherlock and his own fiddle are concerned.”

Since neither brother was laughing at this thrust, I allowed myself but the most trifling nod. I hoped it would be construed by both parties as indication of my following the conversation but not an endorsement in front of my old friend of his brother’s musical criticism.

“Goldsborough had a sister,” Mycroft continued. “Anne. Was engaged to be married at the time of Phillips’s murder to an American in the foreign service here in England.”

“You can be sure, Watson,” Holmes interrupted, “that no-one connected with any government office who works on British soil goes unnoticed by my brother.”

“If I may,” Mycroft said, removing his arm from the mantel and standing up to his full height like a wounded soldier attempting to overcome his hurt, “the American in question, one William F. Stead, is attached to the American consulate in Nottingham. Unfortunately, both he and his new wife are somewhere on the continent at present—Rome, I believe—on consular business and are not expected to return before some time next week.”

As the rain began to diminish, the more the darkness outside the
window lessened, and the more superfluous seemed the dim glow in the fireplace. Nonetheless, message completed, Mycroft turned to the grate and held his hands before the dying red embers.

“I do believe, Watson,” Holmes said, “that before we both go running off to America, I really ought to see if this American and his wife who are both so closely tied to one of the principals in the case have anything of interest to tell me.”

I was forced to concur, of course, much as I didn’t relish travelling to New York to begin the investigation on my own. Still, the charming Mrs. Frevert, who promised to be so very hospitable, would be waiting, and I could begin gathering information for Holmes as I had done so many times before.

Suddenly Mycroft turned from the fire to face me.

“Since you seem determined to get yourself implicated in my brother’s rashness, Doctor,” he said, “I feel compelled to tell you what I have already told him. Mrs. Frevert’s point about the seventh bullet? Absolute poppycock. Typical fancy of an overactive female mind. I can understand my quixotic brother falling for that kind of nonsense, Dr. Watson, but I was counting on you, a man of science, to be more sensible. I had hoped of talking you both out of this fool’s errand, but I see now that I was sadly mistaken.”

Having finished speaking, Mycroft turned his back on us and resumed facing the grate, a position that Holmes and I rightly took as his announcement that our meeting had ended.

At least, by the time we left the Diogenes Club, the rain had disappeared.

Thanks to Mycroft’s arranging my travelling papers, the preparations for the trip went smoothly. Within two days, I had
been able to send my wife on a month’s visit to Lincolnshire, refer all of my patients to Harley Street, provide the appropriate instructions to our maid Polly, and pack the various clothes and necessities I thought I would be needing on such an adventure, including my old Eley’s No. 2. “Be sure to carry a pistol, Watson,” Holmes had warned me. “You’re going to America, after all.”

Despite the distance of my impending voyage, our leave-taking was hardly a sentimental affair. Holmes gave me my instructions: to gather information on as many of the personages involved with Phillips’s death as I could before his own arrival, which he estimated at about a week after mine. Just before my departure, however, he did offer me some final thoughts on the enormity of the crime we were about to scrutinise, and these he pronounced with the greatest degree of seriousness. “Murder is a monstrous act, Watson,” he said, “but political assassination is more heinous still; in a political murder, not only is the victim destroyed, but also the aspirations of those whose ideals and dreams he champions.”

With those words still reverberating in my mind, I found myself about to travel south for the second time in less than a week. On this occasion, however, my ultimate destination was not the southern coast of England but rather the eastern seaboard of the United States of America, a prospect that filled me with both excitement and trepidation.

The boat-train for Southampton left from Waterloo. This, the largest railway nexus in London, was in the throes of reconstruction. Over the first six platforms, workmen were toiling on a mammoth glass and steel roof that allowed a hazy morning sunshine to flood the hall.

Although many compartments in the first-class carriages were
crowded, mine was occupied by only a solitary traveller, an ageing, bespectacled vicar whose balding head was fringed with grey. Reading a well-fingered Bible, he looked up as the warning whistle sounded, but returned to his text once the train had lurched into the start of its eighty-mile journey.

Rattling past shops and warehouses and later suburban gardens filled with crocuses and daffodils, we soon left London. Indeed, even before the slate-roofed houses of the city had given way to the thatched cottages of the countryside, the vicar had propped his reading glasses on his forehead, closed his eyes, and allowed the soporific swaying of our coach to lull him into a snore-filled sleep. I, however, entertaining images of New York City and the intrigue of a murder case rather than the fantasies conjured in some far-off dream-world, was too filled with anticipation to enjoy a similar repose.

We streaked past woods of fir that, as the train rumbled through the grassy knolls and dells of northwestern Surrey, were interrupted by clusters of spruce and birch and oak. Then, after skirting ice-blue lakes and reflecting pools with the Hog’s Back in the distance, we started the climb through the tree-shrouded embankments beyond Basingstoke to our highest elevation.

Having completed my medical training at the large military hospital in the nearby village of Netley, I was familiar with much of the terrain. Consequently, after racing through Winchester and Eastleigh at seventy miles per hour, I recognised the downward sweep towards the coast. Soon we were traversing the distinctive chalk cuttings of the Hampshire Downs and then, parallel to the Itchen, approaching the fields of the coastal plains and the cottages at the outskirts of Southampton. Finally, at no more than
a walking pace, we passed the imposing South Western Railway Hotel and crossed Canute Road. Only at the whining full stop of the carriages did the vicar, snorting gruffly, awaken.

Eager to disembark, however, I responded with only the quickest of smiles and, collecting my bowler, swung my scarf round my neck, nodded farewell to my still disoriented travelling companion who was rubbing the remains of sleep from his eyes, and stepped onto the platform. Trunk in tow thanks to the help of a porter, I made my way across the recently opened White Star Dock (renamed Ocean Dock in 1919) to R.M.S.
Majesty
looming in her berth just beyond the railway terminus.

Inside, I could feel my heart pumping excitedly; outside, against my raw cheeks, I could feel the cool March breeze blowing off the Solent. Above me in a sky turned grey towered the steamer’s three black funnels, great clouds of dark smoke wafting heavenward from each. Blue Peter, the azure flag with a white square at its centre, hung from a forward yardarm indicating, so the porter advised, that the ship was ready for departure.

Within minutes after I had climbed the gangplank and made my way to C Deck, the tugboats took their positions, the ropes were thrown free, the siren wailed its final warning, and we began to move. The deck shuddered briefly; then, almost imperceptibly at first, the gap between ship and pier began to widen, and
Majesty
inched towards the entrance to the docks. At no-one in particular, I waved my bowler, joining in the camaraderie among the friends and relatives of other travellers standing on the quay blown about by the wind as they saw their loved ones off to America.

Soon we were steaming down Southampton Water, passing familiar Netley Hospital and various beaches, then slowing to turn
to starboard around Calshot Spit, entering Thorn Channel, and next turning to port round a buoy to enter a deeper channel, past Egypt Point, past Cowes, past Spithead, and past the long pier at Ryde. Before we left the Isle of Wight behind us, the harbour pilot climbed from
Majesty
to a cutter, leaving us on our own to steam past Culver Cliff with only a single call at Cherbourg across the channel before we reached the open sea.

Since the purpose of my journey was so serious, I paid little attention to the first-class accommodations available to me. To be sure, had it not been for the slow rolling of the deck, I might easily have mistaken my berth for a room at the Savoy or the Cavendish. It was elegantly furnished in Jacobean decor and included a private bath. Panelled in oak, the social halls were even grander, especially the smoking lounge in whose leather chairs I enjoyed an occasional after-dinner cigar.

I had little desire for such amenities, however. Excluding my early-morning walks round the deck in the bracing cold and my encounters with the rowing machine in the ship’s gymnasium, I spent most of my time familiarising myself with the mind of the man whose murder we were about to investigate. Holmes had furnished me with a modest library: two novels by David Graham Phillips,
The Cost
and
The Plum Tree,
as well as a collection of all the articles in
The Treason of the Senate.
Moreover, before beginning my literary adventure, I was to peruse the biography of Phillips that Holmes had tucked between the pages of
The Cost.
Written on a folded piece of yellowing foolscap in Holmes’s meticulous script, this life of Phillips had been compiled by my friend once he had begun his index entry on the
Victoria-Camperdown
collision. He had revised it the first time after meeting Phillips in Baker
Street, but had not touched it again until after agreeing to help Mrs. Frevert investigate her brother’s death. Varied shades of ink differentiated the three instalments of Phillips’s history.

In summary, Phillips had been born in Madison, Indiana, on 31 October, the eve of All Hallows Day, in 1867. He had three older sisters, one of whom we had met, and a younger brother. Instructed by his father—a bank cashier, Sunday School teacher, and occasional substitute for the Methodist pastor—young Graham was reading the Bible before he was four. By the time he was ten, he had been tutored in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and German; by the time he was twelve, he had read all of Hugo, Scott, and Dickens. In 1882 he attended Asbury University in Greencastle, Indiana, but spent his final two years of college life at Princeton. Following graduation, he was employed as a reporter first for the Cincinnati
Commercial Gazette,
then for the New York Sun, and finally for the New York World. From 1901 until his death in 1911, he wrote primarily novels, completing more than twenty, including the two-volume
Susan Lenox, Her Fall and Rise,
which was published some six years after he was killed.
^*

Enveloped in a steamer rug on a deck chair for the next few days, I immersed myself in the lives of the characters in
The Cost
and
The Plum Tree,
fictional inhabitants of the equally fictional St. Christopher, Indiana, a midwestern town much, I surmised, like Phillips’s birthplace. No-one in reality, however, could be expected to equal the moral stature of the protagonist of these two novels, Hampden Scarborough. Elected Governor in
The Cost
and President in
The Plum Tree,
he countered the exploiters who preyed
upon the poor and helpless. With a handsome profile and piercing eyes, here was a powerful figure who must have embodied all that Phillips believed was good in the world. Exhibiting a pragmatic faith in man not as a “falling angel, but a rising animal,” Scarborough traced his ancestry back to those anti-Royalists who served with Cromwell and who enabled their descendant to champion a new kind of royalty, “the kings of the new democracy.” “Over him,” Phillips had written, “was the glamour of the world-that-ought-to-be in which he lived and had the power to compel others to live as long as they were under the spell of his personality.” Scarborough wore “the typical Western-American expression—shrewd, easygoing good humour.” He revealed a “magnetic something which we try to fix—and fail—when we say ‘charm.’ What’s more, like the sartorially elegant Phillips himself, this modern St. George, ready to engage the dragons of the plutocracy, was “dazzling to behold.”

I confess to being moved by Scarborough’s impressive and noble political victories, but these fictional exploits could not prepare me for the direct assault Phillips himself made on the real American government in
The Treason of the Senate.
Holmes was right to suggest that I familiarise myself with the articles that had ignited so much ire. Little did I suspect that, armed with my newly acquired righteousness from Hampden Scarborough, I could be so aroused by a six-year-old diatribe against a foreign institution; but as Phillips laid out his charges, the more indignant I became.