Fic for Tazlet: In Heaven and Earth
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holmesticeTitle: In Heaven and Earth
Recipient: Tazlet
Author:marta_bee
Betas: ancientreader, lindahoyland
Verse: ACD Holmes
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, Mrs. Hudson, Sherrinford Holmes
Rating: PG
Warnings: adult themes related to mental illness and questionable (but period-appropriate) parenting
Summary: "I fear that if the matter is beyond humanity it is certainly beyond me." (The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot)
In which Holmes takes on an unsolvable case, and Watson makes some deductions of his own.
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With apologies to the proud residents of Cardiff town, present and past. In my defence Russell T. Davies went there first.
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On rare occasions, I feel obliged to relate a case without being able to offer a satisfactory resolution. This happens in fact more often than the written record would suggest because I often see little enough value in dwelling on Holmes’s failure, either in instructing the reader or even in providing a thrilling story for their enjoyment. But the case of the unquiet dead, as Holmes took to calling it, is worth remembering. Those familiar with my accounts would be forgiven to think Holmes some sort of calculating machine, where forensic detail is put in, computed upon by his remarkable mind, and out pops the correct conclusion so justice might be served, with no hint of bias or even perspective.
But Holmes is a man first and foremost, and though he is remarkably skilled at keeping the grit of sentiment from the lens that is his rational ability, any lens will have its own curvature, concave or convex and by some degree, and this too must be accounted for. I sometimes forget that myself, and it is good, I think, to remember.
The adventure began one quiet enough evening in early October, 1899. I sat at my desk, engrossed in a half-finished letter to my nephew Peter; Holmes was sitting at the table where we ate our meals, surrounded by his scrapbook-pages, his pot of glue, and piles of newspaper-clippings which I’m sure made sense to him, if him alone, laid out on every available surface.
"Is that it?" Holmes cried out. "Do you have it?"
I looked up in surprise, but Holmes’s questions had not been directed toward me. Mrs. Hudson had slipped in, unnoticed, and was now standing by the table, the tea-tray balanced against her hip. Certainly there wasn’t a clear surface large enough for the sugar pot, much less the full service and the plate of lemon biscuits she was eager to set down.
"Yes, yes," she answered, "though how you knew -- " Holmes fixed her with an accusatory gaze, or what would have passed as such between two people less well acquainted. After fourteen years with him as her lodger, she could hardly claim such surprise. A change in tack, then. "And how you can spot it so deep in my pocket, yet still not notice the sun’s passage across the sky and reason that this table must be put to other uses is beyond me." She waited for him to move a small pile of clippings to a new home of his choosing before setting down the biscuits in their place.
"And just what is ‘it’?" I asked as I stoppered my ink-pot and joined them at the table.
"Our esteemed Mrs. Hudson, or rather her equally esteemed brother --"
"Augie is a pawn-broker in Cardiff, and he’d not thank you for giving him such airs."
"My apologies. Our esteemed Mrs. Hudson, or rather her less-than-esteemed brother --"
That earned a smile. She set the tea service in my as-yet-unoccupied chair, then crossed the room to deposit her parcel on the ottoman before Holmes’s chair by the fire. "Augie bought it from an innkeeper in town. Named it ‘rubbish’ so he got a good price, though of course he knew better. Said it might be of some literary note. Though" -- here she nodded at the VR etched in bullet-holes along the far wall, and I wondered how infamous that story was among her relations and friends -- "though it was the more criminal elements he thought might spare my sitting-room walls another assault."
Holmes cocked his eyebrow at that and moved to open the parcel straight away but then he hesitated. "Some pleasures are better savored, don’t you agree?"
"And hot tea waits for no man," I said. He scowled at that, not unfondly, and started clearing the table in earnest.
"I’ll leave you gentlemen to it," Mrs. Hudson said. Then, leaning in closer, as conspirators might: "Abigail’s minding the bread alone, and she’s as like to burn it as not, poor dear. Dinner at seven?"
I nodded our agreement and thanks, and moved the tea-service to its more proper home on the now half-straightened table. Holmes, never one to leave a boundary untested or a last nerve untrodden, thought fit to issue her out in song:
I had hoped to share in the mystery of Holmes’s anticipated parcel. After tea, or after dinner perhaps. At a glance I could see it was a leather wallet of the sort couriers used to protect documents from the weather, thick enough for perhaps twenty sheets folded thrice; perhaps less. But that revealed nothing of their contents, and I could guess no more until Holmes chose to reveal it.
In the weeks that followed I thought back on that glimpse, recognizing the splotches indicative of a tanning process common in the Aberdeen of my youth but that hadn’t been fashionable for some decades, at least in London. An older wallet, then, but showing none of the normal signs of wear. Feasible: by Mrs. Hudson’s own account an innkeeper had sold it to a pawn-broker, and it could well have spent years in a box of abandoned property before at last it was sold. It told me little enough about the wallet’s contents, but I liked to believe Holmes would approve of the way I’d put his methods to work.
Though to have his judgment on that point he’d have to let me in and talk to me about the whole thing. At first he’d been all excitement, with not a hint of embarrassment or reserve, giving no indication the parcel was for his eyes only, but over tea our conversation had come to the letter I’d been answering. To my nephew Peter; I was sure he’d be married come spring, though he hadn’t yet admitted it, and thought Holmes might enjoy the clues that had led me to that conclusion.
Quite the contrary: whether the it was talk of marriage or of family generally, Holmes had grown distant, and when he came back to me he pressed his lips together tightly, as if guarding against some words that might slip past. Later, when we sat in our chairs after dinner, pipes in hand, he kept putting me off, dancing from one idle topic of conversation to another. The upcoming trial of the albino cobbler (how the barristers had mangled his pretty evidence!); or whether we could hope to obtain tickets when Balakirev played at the Royal Philharmonic (unlikely, barring a grateful client with sufficient connections). The papers remained untouched and uncommented-upon.
I knew when to leave well enough alone, and unlike some people, I could be intrigued by a mystery without it overwhelming all other considerations.
So I was quite surprised when he raised the question again some ten weeks later, completely unprompted by me. It was unseasonably warm for early December, and as both my patients and the cleverer members of London’s criminal classes had conspired to leave us alone, we’d decided on a stroll through Regent’s Park. The fresh air would do us both good, I judged: elm, beech, and cypress rather than the slaughtered holly and other evergreens with which Mrs. Hudson insisted on decking the halls seemed a welcome change. For my part I felt as content as a house-cat napping in a spot of sun, but Holmes resembled more closely the kitten with a feather held over-head, poised equally to pounce or flee at the first provocation.
"I thought I might go up to Cardiff for the new year," he said, apropos of nothing at all so far as I could tell. He effected a passable imitation of a smile. But …
"Cardiff? Really, Holmes?"
"Burges has done quite interesting work in his renovation of Castell Coch, I’ve heard."
"Cardiff," I repeated, as if tasting the word in my mouth. "Holmes, there is precisely nothing of interest in Cardiff." I could well understand his desire to leave London behind for a while; this new year, bringing with it a new century, had driven all of London’s least rational elements straight to our door, each one ready to attribute every creak in the attic floorboards to fae folk, disembodied spirits, or other agents supernatural. But there was Sussex, if he wished a change in location. Brighton. The Continent. Even Aberdeen; the future Mrs. Peter Watson would surely welcome a visit from the famous detective. If it were a professional obligation, he needn’t plan so far ahead, nor tempt me to Wales with talk of architecture. But there was perhaps one explanation.
"You wish to speak with Augie. Mrs. Hudson’s Augie; or his innkeeper-customer, perhaps." I smiled, wolf-like. "You found something in those papers. And they thought it would distract you in the absence of contemporary puzzles. What puzzle could possibly intrigue Sherlock Holmes? There is something -- criminal, in those papers, is there not?"
"Well spotted," Holmes said, his voice rich in feigned respect. Then, giving my arm a good-natured squeeze to assure me of his good humor, he continued, "You imagine a dowager’s jewels stolen out of her very house -- in Cardiff, Watson, truly? -- or murder most foul. Whereas I am as easily enthralled by those odd dancing men Hilton Cubitt found scrawled on his windowsill in Norfolk."
"And yet you let it rest until you guessed they were in true danger," I answered. "What have you found?"
"Murder, yes. Perhaps. A near forty-year-old murder, three of them in fact, if it’s more than a simple accident. The parties involved are likely dead themselves or scattered to the wind; but for my own peace, I would know the truth. And for the sake of bringing peace to the sister of the natural suspect, who seemed most eager to clear her brother’s name."
We made our way down the well-shaded walk as he laid out the essential facts for me. Emmanuel Peace, an accounts clerk with no enemies to speak of, had been found in the viewing room of the local mortuary, his hyoid bone broken -- a sure sign of strangulation -- and his body thrown against the table where his late grandmother had been laid out for her final dressing. Gwynneth Davies, his house-maid, and the boy employed to work his stables (an Evan Price, now deceased of cholera), were out in the yard, leaving Gabriel Sneed the undertaker alone in the house.
Naturally suspicion had fallen on Mr. Sneed. They had been alone in the house. He was newly deceased, and strangulation such a sudden way to die; it seemed unlikely (said the police reports) that someone could have escaped while he lay dying, or slipped out of the house unnoticed before Mr. Sneed claimed to have found the corpse. And Sneed was an undertaker, grisly work. Men drawn to it often had a certain temperament, didn’t they? (I thought of my own father, a butcher who’d had the spark of insight to sell organs from the higher mammals to medical schools when human cadavers were not forthcoming. How rarely those reputations were well-earned!) But Sneed had no motive and quite a lot to lose by assaulting a grieving relative in his own house. And he was a quiet man by all counts: widowed, a regular parishioner at St. Mary’s. Respectable.
And he was equally dead come morning. A gas line had exploded in the mortuary, wreaking all manner of havoc on the town’s recently departed and leaving two fresh corpses to add to their number: Sneed with his head caved in from a fallen ceiling-beam, and Gwynneth apparently dead from the fire itself. Price had insisted Master Sneed simply could not have done what they said. That he’d not hurt a fly, much less Gwynneth, for all his dour ways, and that the lights had been flickering in recent weeks anyway. Likely there was something wrong with the gas. And with neither suspected killers nor witnesses left to interview, the official investigation had petered out rather quietly. Even so, thirty-nine years later, people still would talk.
"This all happened so long ago,” I said after Holmes completed his account. “Some might say time’s passage has made it near unsolvable.” Holmes nodded noncommittally. "No clues to be found after all this time, no future crimes to be prevented. No innocent man sitting in prison unjustly for all these years." He did not answer me; half turned away. "What aren’t you telling me, Holmes?"
"The account -- our best source of information here, aside from the official reports which make Scotland Yard’s seem positively helpful -- is from the famous Charles Dickens."
Now that was a feature of interest, as one says, but it hardly explained his interest. If anything it raised more questions. "And you put your faith in the account of a novelist?"
"Certain details led me to believe him. Claims borne out in the official records, which he would have no way of knowing if he were not also a witness. And Dickens was in town that night, engaged for a dramatic reading of his Christmas Carol, but he was noticeably absent from his scheduled encore recitation the following evening. He’d left town on a midnight train, with no notice or explanation, and was next seen a week later in Gads Hill. Something unnerved him, certainly." Holmes shrugged at that. He never shrugged, rarely left his meaning to so imprecise an instrument. "I see no reason to disbelieve his account."
"Fair enough," I said. "But that does not account for your interest."
"I have a brother." As if that explained it. "Not Mycroft; another one. Sherrinford. We are not close."
"So it would seem."
"He manages an old country estate, in Cornwall. At Caradon Hill, not far from the old copper-mines. They did well enough in my father’s day, but with the mine’s decline - well. More mouths and less coin to go around. Not an uncommon story, I’m sure. He keeps the old place solvent, no small achievement; and he frees Mycroft and myself from our familial duties."
Holmes opened his mouth again, as if to say something more, but then he closed it without further comment. "We were in Cornwall two years ago," I prodded him. "The Cornish Horror." Still Holmes walked in silence, his attention singularly focused on a goldfinch perched in a cypress-branch some small distance off. "You never mentioned that you had a brother."
"And I never mentioned the garroting I once investigated in Bethnal Green," he said peevishly, "just because we we happened to be in Trafalgar Square. The Holmes-stead was nearly two days’ away by hansom."
That was just the kind of word-play Holmes knew I loved to engage in, but I would not be distracted by his bauble. "We’d have made it in one by train," I said. "Less still if we’d hired one of those new mechanised carriages you’ve been keen to try."
"And why were we in Cornwall to begin with? You had said my nerves needed a rest. Do you really believe a visit with a brother I’ve not spoken to in some three decades would have served that purpose well?" Thinking on my own rare meetings with Harry, I was hard-pressed to disagree, but I would not let him off the hook so easily by admitting it. A long silent pause, the air as thick with expectations as our rooms in Baker Street had been with the scent of fir, until at last:
"Sherrinford and I do not -- we do not do well together. He sees to things at home. He kept me in tuition and tobacco when I was younger, enabling me to prolong my studies in a way I never would have had I needed to pay my own fees, until I was the curious man you found me on our first meeting." Another stab at word-play, a shiny distraction to pull me from the present course, but I let it pass.
"He." Holmes frowned. "He is, and I always thought that enough. I did not know him well -- he went abroad for a while when I was quite young, and when he came back …. well, he was not fit for Bedlam, but he was in a sorry state, that much even I could see. He would sit for hours, in near total stillness, only to break it with these sudden bursts of energy. Mycroft was a year away from university, and he was locked away in his room with his studies, most days. There was a concern, too, that Sherrinford would be less …. restrained than he was around me. My parents thought it would do him good, to have reason to hold himself in check. I don’t doubt they thought I’d be safe, and that I’d give our poor harried mother some respite while I sat with him. But even so."
The silence returned, this time much less intentional. We’d long since passed our goldfinch but still Holmes stared down the path, unseeing. "Mycroft is seven years your senior," I said at last, "and Sherrinford …."
"Ten his." Then, in answer to the unvoiced question: "He was twenty-five; I was eight."
"By Jove, Holmes."
"I had a way about me," Holmes said, whether in explanation or defense even now I am not sure. "I acted older than my age, and often had even myself fooled. And Sherrinford never laid a hand upon me. I would sit by the window and read to him. Dickens, clearly. I did the voices, you see; it drew him out of himself better than most anything else, and it gave me a raft to cling to. It was summer, and I had the afternoons to fill; or to be filled for me, at our mother’s insistence. I most remember the rooms being unbearably still, and wishing I could escape to my chemistry set."
He shrugged again, the second time inside a quarter-hour. It unnerved me, but I let it pass. "It was the unpredictability of it all more than anything. I quite liked rule and order, even then.” In an obvious (some might say artless, for him) effort to lighten our conversation he added, "But I quite liked doing the voices -- well, you said once that the stage lost a great talent when I took up the investigative sciences. We did Great Expectations, and Bleak House, and were well started on David Copperfield, when the new school year began."
At last the disparate strands were starting to come together, Holmes’s interest in that particular author and his reluctance to let me in once confronted with the papers’ arrival, his drive to make rational sense of the mysterious deaths and his growing irritation with the superstitious turn so much of London had taken with the approaching century’s end. I would make my own investigations into this family history, but I could do that on my own time and in my own way. "Very well," I said, wrinkling my nose in exaggerated disgust. "To Cardiff."
"As if you would have other plans," Holmes said. Then, affected as an afterthought: "And Sherrinford is not the mystery we are investigating."
"So you say," I said. "I’m sure Wales is lovely at the year’s end."
We did not speak of the matter for some two weeks after, though I knew by the telegrams and mail that his own investigation continued apace. For myself, I wrote to Bill Murray, still employed with the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers after all those years, to confirm a suspicion I had about Holmes’s brother. But one Tuesday evening, perhaps a week before Christmas, Holmes made it quite impossible for me to ignore our official case any longer.
"Bar the doors!" Holmes cried out as I entered our rooms. "This city is overrun by fools."
"What, that nice man I passed on the stair?"
"That ‘nice man,’ as you name him, tried to convince me his milkman was a vampire. Simply because he spoke with a Romanian accent and had ever-so-slightly pointed teeth."
"You scared him," I said, willfully putting off comment on Holmes’s other claims. I will admit it: I derive more pleasure than perhaps I should from pushing him to irritation (in small quantities, at least). But then I have never claimed to be a good man.
"Bloody vampires. They do not even turn milk," Holmes said. Then he scowled. "Or there are no myths about them turning milk; you know my meaning." He threw himself back along the couch in a fit of pique. "This city has gone utterly insane."
"That implies a change in its basic state," I said. Holding out the envelope Mrs. Hudson had entrusted to me, I added, "Post for you. A Mrs. Smythe of Cardiff."
Holmes looked up at that. "Ah. Her mother helped organize the Dickens reading, and she was on hand collecting tickets. She is the closest I have found to a witness for that part of Mr. Dickens’s account."
"It is most outlandish," I said, remembering the portion Holmes referenced. Mrs. Peace, the very same who had been laid out in Sneed’s morgue, according to the official accounts, had turned up at the theater. Opening the letter, I read its contents quickly. "Ms. Smythe confirms she received Mrs. Peace’s ticket -- it is well documented in her ledger -- and that the old lady sat quietly, not unlike the other guests in attendance, until Mr. Dickens at last reached the appearance of Marley’s ghost in Scrooge’s door-knocker. Then she let out ‘a hellish scream, and emitted a great cloud of blue gas from her mouth, which hovered overhead for some long moments before finally escaping into a nearby gas lamp.’"
"Oh, humbug!" Holmes exclaimed. Sitting up, he took the letter from my hand and skimmed it. "I thought she might shed some light on the affair. A mask made to look like a dead woman, blue vapor released on cue from a box hidden under her chair: a trained illusionist could certainly manage it. And it gave the audience a thrill; more than the full reading would have, I’d imagine. The organizing committee might have arranged it beforehand. But Mrs. Smythe says she knew of no such plan, and she can hardly believe her mother would have been involved in any such affair. The elder Mrs. Smythe was apparently the height of propriety. Her daughter, our Liza, on the other hand, describes herself as ‘quite the rapscallion in those days,’ and she’d gladly have played her part in the bit of excitement, if she’d been made aware."
"But surely that would serve Gabriel Sneed’s case. If Mrs. Peace was alive when her grandson was murdered -- "
"There. Are. No. Ghosts," Holmes said, punctuating each word with his fist against the wall. He rubbed peevishly at his temple; I would have to have Mrs. Hudson brew him some ginger-root tea, lest he reach for stronger medicines. "No spirits wandering the streets of Cardiff so they might see the great author. No, Watson: she was declared dead some six hours prior. No breath, no pulse, no movement in her eyes to suggest she was at all aware of those around her. I have her certificate of death from the police. If this case’s resolution lies beyond the established laws of nature, then how I’m to manage it, I’m quite unsure."
Those words were so similar to ones Holmes had spoken two years ago, in Cornwall. They were etched in my brain, as unalterable as ink on parchment. So much of that case had proved unforgettable to me, it was all so ghastly, ghoulish even. But Holmes seemed comparatively unaffected by it once we returned to London; or else he hid its effects from me quite expertly. I wondered: was he quoting himself intentionally, or had the episode simply weighed so heavily on his brain of late, those old words came back to him of their own volition.
Holmes had set aside the inconsistencies that time, had even taken me arrowhead-hunting on the beach. I thought of the Mesolithic flint-scraper in my old army-chest, along with my army medals and souvenirs of our other adventures together, and one of Mary’s six pearls from Sholto. Memento mortis; or memento mori? And how well would Holmes have managed it, had the answer not been so quickly discoverable? If the case had persisted for weeks or months rather than mere days? Even with the mystery less than a day old, he’d sat up all night filling our rented rooms with tobacco-smoke and peering out into the inky darkness.
"Perhaps she simply didn’t know of the plan," I allowed. "Liza Smythe. What is your next step?"
"An Inspector Hughes with the Cardiff police force has offered to send me some tissue samples they retained from the explosion. Yes, after all these years; some in their office have a modicum of competence. The samples are sure to be dessicated, possibly worse, but I will run what tests I can on them and see if they at last yield more light than smoke."
"For my part I wish to speak with this Mrs. Smythe," I said. "You can never know what she has forgotten, or held back on purpose. And Augie Hudson as well. If Dickens’s account is our best source of information, I would know all I can about the circumstances surrounding its discovery."
"Good man," Holmes said. He offered me a wry grin. "Are you sure I cannot tempt you into starting our journey early? If our clerk with the vampire-milkman is any indication, I could be persuaded to leave London tonight."
"Would that we could," I laughed. "But I have patients still, and you still owe the grocer’s bill. And we have social duties as well: Mycroft has asked us round to his club tonight for Christmas drinks. Are you sure you won’t join us?"
Holmes, doing his best impression of a fainting heroine from a penny novel, threw himself back into the couch cushions, letting the letter drop to the floor.
The next ten days were crammed full of festivities both professional and social for Holmes and myself, and Christmas drinks (twice rescheduled) with Holmes’s brother Mycroft that somehow fit neatly into both categories. Holmes himself begged pardon on that occasion, claiming a winter’s cold that was much improved by the next morning. Finally we were free -- to be locked in a small train compartment with a three-hundred-pound accounts clerk with a truly appalling case of halitosis. That night, though, saw us ensconced in our rooms in Cardiff.
Then came the necessary interviews: with the retired police inspector, who had dismissed so readily the possibility of an unapprehended intruder in Sneed’s mortuary; with the Widow Wellington, the neighbor from across the road who had seen a man matching the great Mister Dickens’s description, along with his odd companion dressed in a natty jumper and trousers and not much else. And of course with Augie Hudson, who asked after our health and his sister’s and then promptly directed us to Ian Lewis, a jack-of-all-trades at the very inn where we were staying, who had sold him the documents.
"I’m sure it’s just as the papers say," Lewis said once we were gathered in a store-room at the inn. Said it repeatedly, and without volunteering much else. To go through all this trouble, to wait so long, all to be confounded by a witness who would not do us the courtesy of telling his story. It was maddening!
I mustered as warm a smile as I could manage. "Mr. Lewis. You clearly know something of Mr. Holmes." He nodded, threatening to bite his lip plain through. "You have read my stories?"
Another nod. "We’re not so uncultured as all that. I’ve read The Strand."
"So you know, to Mr. Holmes, the smallest detail can often prove invaluable." Still he hesitated. He was too young to be a genuine suspect, of course, but he was certainly holding something back. "If there is anything you can add," I urged him, "something you might have thought trivial at the time perhaps, we would be most grateful."
Holmes, his patience evidently worn thin, leaned forward and steepled his long, precise fingers under his chin. "Mr. Augustus Hudson, the pawn-broker, directed us to you and not to your master. Why might that be?"
"I’m sure I don’t know!" Lewis protested, and Holmes tapped his fingers together, as regular and unyielding as a musician’s metronome. At last something in Lewis’s expression broke. "But I’ve done nothing wrong, sir," he said, "nothing of consequence, surely."
"Perhaps you had better tell us the whole story, then," I said.
He took a steadying breath. "Often enough guests will leave some small possession behind," he began at last. "We hold on to it for a time, and if it remains unclaimed, the more valuable pieces Master Haynes turns over to your Mr. Hudson. It’s his by rights if it lays unclaimed for six weeks, and we get a high enough class of guests, they won’t always send for their bits and bobs. The less worthy items he gives me to dispose of as I see fit. Well. I thought if he could earn some coin off our customers’ carelessness every now and again, so might I. Every little bit helps, after all." He puffed out his chest a bit at his own cleverness. "Mr. Hudson gave me a pound ten shilling for the whole box."
"Not so little a bit, then," I noted.
"I never thought to hear of those oddments again. And I still don’t see as I’ve done anything wrong, by selling them. But there is something else."
There often was. Beside me, Holmes leaned back in his chair, adopting a more welcoming stance. For my part I met the man’s gaze, inviting him to look at me and ignore Holmes for the moment, judging that of the two of us, even in my irritation I must be the less imposing audience. "You seem a decent man," I said. "I’m sure you’ve done nothing to warrant such discomfort."
"I’ve done no more than follow my master’s lead," he said, a little defensively. "It’s just this isn’t as fine a part of town as it was thirty years ago, and it’s harder to fill all the beds. The affair with Mrs. Peace, with Mr. Sneed -- it’s a bit of a local legend, you see, and we’re so near the lecture hall where it all started. So I bang on the pipes now and again, or move the guests’ tobacco-pipes from the hearth to on top of the bureau when I go in to light the fires. Just enough to keep the town talking."
He looked Holmes straight in the eye in a bout of courage I would have thought him incapable of. "I don’t believe in ghosts, sir. I can’t explain what happened with Mrs. Peace. It’s just a good bit of custom. And Master Haynes wouldn’t thank me for ruining his scheme." Beside me I saw Holmes pressing his lips together, a barely-suppressed smile threatening to show itself. People really could be such fools. "And it really is just as the paper says. I’d only add Mr. Dickens left earlier than planned, and at an odd hour: returned to his rooms past ten and did not settle his account until near three in the morning. He left the very night Mrs. Peace was --well-- spotted."
"What of the paper itself?" I asked. "Is this the kind you have on-hand?"
Lewis picked up a sheet and held it to the lamp. "No; we’ve had our own stock printed, blank but with a watermark in the corner. This looks to be Mr. Dickens’s own stock. Though the case you brought it in -- now that is odd! We use one of a similar style for our post. Sell them to the guests, too, when they ask for them. You should ask Master Haynes to be certain, but Mr. Dickens may have bought that off us. Odd, that he’d go to such trouble and still leave his writings behind and not send for them after."
Holmes hummed in agreement. "Your theory, Watson, that Dickens meant these records to be found gains some credence. Mister Lewis, have you any idea why the papers only came to light now, nearly forty years later?"
"Master Haynes said he found it some few months ago, wedged between the back of his old desk and the wall." He pointed to a sharp crease in the leather. "See how the case was shoved flat for so long. The old desk is a great oak monstrosity, and there was hardly any cause to move it, to clean the wall behind, until he bought him a new piece -- smaller, to accommodate the second file drawer, you see -- this last June. I don’t believe he held it back on purpose, if that’s your thought."
"Perhaps," Holmes said. "Well, Mister Lewis: I believe I am satisfied for the moment, though I may have more questions later. Will you give us the room for a few moments? I would discuss matters with Watson. And tell your master we would like to clarify a few points with him as well, when he will speak to us."
"Of course, sirs." Lewis rose to exit but paused at the door. "Perhaps it means nothing, but you, Mr. Watson, told me to hold nothing back. It was the queerest thing. My uncle was one of the men who helped clear away the wreckage, looking for survivors that night after the mortuary exploded. A horrible business, to hear him describe it: limbs blown off their owners, and the smell of charred flesh all about.
"So I thought, when he told me the story as a boy years later, perhaps his imagination was run away with him. But there were some details I couldn’t so easily dismiss. His two friends with whom he was sharing rooms, they all went in to that scene together. They all worked for the railway and so their watches were set to the station-clock, within a second of each other; yet when they came out of that house, my uncle’s was forty-seven seconds ahead, and his friends’ more than a minute behind: one minute seventeen for the one, and one minute thirty-two for the other’s. And they were all in good enough health before, but they all came out the worse, and in such different ways as well: blinding headaches for one, and the other coughing up green phlegm for a month. My uncle got the worst of it, his hand mangled as if it had been caught in a vise though he swore nothing of the sort had happened."
"That is of interest," Holmes said. "Were there any theories at the time?"
"All three saw a doctor, of course, and he said there must have been some sort of gas in the air. But you are both men of science. Have you ever heard of such a thing? That three men might be so affected in different ways, with no one showing any sign of the other men’s maladies? And their watches mis-set like that without the gears being damaged, or the cases or chains come to that?"
"Chemical gases can have odd effects," I said. "It may come to nothing, but we will certainly investigate, and will let you know what comes of it. Who occupies the mortuary now?"
"The space is left empty," Lewis said. "They tore the house down, but no one would take the lot. And I meant what I said, Mr. Watson. I truly don’t believe in spirits. Even when I don’t have a better explanation, talk of ghosts and such seems to raise more questions than it answers; I’d rather say I just don’t know. Still, when I sit and think about it, that affair with the watches does make me wonder, sometimes." And before either Holmes or I could answer, he nodded his courtesy and slipped out the door.
"Ghosts again," Holmes said derisively. "This whole case seems shot through with them. And for all this affair seemed a way to escape the lure of supernatural explanations that has so gripped our clients in London."
"Some elements seem clearer than before. The fact that Lewis banged on the pipes explains so many of those odd stories you received from Liza Smythe. Master Haynes may not have been the only merchant to exploit the story for his own gain. It seems likelier than ever that Mrs. Peace died of a stroke, as the doctor’s reports indicate, and that Mrs. Smythe was simply unaware of the trick being played. And those injuries young Lewis described could speak to a strange gas in the house, though it is singular that the symptoms were specific to each man. Perhaps Sneed did kill Emmanuel Peace, and perhaps his own death and Gwynneth’s were unrelated. It is a better explanation than ghosts from another world, as Dickens claimed."
"Or perhaps Miss Davies witnessed something that Sneed wished to remain hidden, and in trying to silence her he caused his own death as well. Or perhaps there was some other party at work in their deaths. But that is not the story as Charles Dickens relates it, and he was so sure of what he saw! You saw it in his writing, of course, but look how he canceled his engagements and rushed home to his family. And how he took those hours to record what he saw, preserved the pages so they’d be found, even when his account could well make him appear the fool. To write of ghosts wandering the streets of Cardiff; or worse yet, beings from another planet!"
"It could have been the gas," I said, though even as I said it I knew I was grasping at straws. "Headaches, nerve damage, brachial trauma -- who is to say it might not have other queer effects?"
"The watches bother me as well," he said. "That the gears were undamaged - their watches could only become unsynchronized if they reset them manually. But to what end? Why lie?" He rubbed at his chin, a gesture I had come to associate with him considering various options, and I rather suspected I was not going to like what came next.
"We could make a trial," Holmes ventured at last. "We could go back to the house -- "
"No, Holmes."
"Likely the gas has fully dissipated, after all these years, but if we could replicate -- "
"No, Holmes," I insisted. "You really have so little regard for your own health, and for mine? Either there will be no effect of any kind after all these years, in which case we gain nothing; or else you risk a wholly unpredictable effect. We could well die." I did not say: I thought you would have learned this lesson in Cornwall, that my near death would have had a longer-lasting impact even if you cared not about your own.
"And do not suggest you could go in alone, carry my watch in your pocket and take the risk solely on yourself. Losing you again would be worse still." I knew I was venturing dangerously into the sentimental, into those things we always left unsaid, but his determination to know at all costs was leaving me rather unnerved.
"I do not like not knowing," Holmes said after a moment’s silence. His tone was quiet; apologetic, almost, but still determined. "And there are things in need of explanation beyond just the queer yet oddly consistent testimonies. I ran my tests on those tissue samples sent down by the Cardiff police, as you know. I did not want to mention my findings until their own forensic scientists verified them; now I know that they have. You remember the hematology test I had just devised, that first afternoon when Stanford introduced us in the labs at St. Bart’s all those years ago? I subjected the sample from Gwynneth Davies to my tests, with the expected results. There was blood enough, even after all so much time had passed.
"But Sneed’s! I extracted proteins from some samples of his hair they sent down, and they too were unremarkable, but his blood, Watson, his blood! It failed my blood-tests entirely, had none of the normal proteins that might differentiate, say, human from bovine blood,, and when I rehydrated it, introduced a reactive agent to break the compounds into their constitutive parts and ran it through my centrifuge, a strange precipitate fell out. It was of a similar weight to antimony, but with none of the usual properties. I have never seen anything of the kind, organic or otherwise, and his blood was rich with it. It was thoroughly bonded with his hemoglobin; a more poetic man might call it a part of him."
"The sample could have been polluted. Or your tests could have been wrong."
"And Llewellyn’s, the man with the Cardiff force? And in light of Dickens’ account? Watson, I do not like not knowing."
I threw up my hands in despair. "Then you had best get used to it! I will grant you, there are some puzzles worth unravelling, but not at the cost of our lives. Your life, Holmes. Why is it so important to you to know? You have had other cases you could not solve before."
"We have been foiled by a lack of evidence. Gaps in our understanding we could not fill. This is different, though, is it not? Here we have a witness, a credible man whom I have every reason to believe, save that what he is claiming cannot possibly be true. Spirits from another world! And empirical facts that cannot be explained -- an infiltrate in the blood, and all this queer behavior."
"And if our witness were not the famous author, but were someone less renowned, and less a figure in your personal past? Say, Evan Price, the stable-boy, who was certainly better situated to comment on his master’s behavior, were he still alive?" Holmes sat mutely. Someone who knew him less well than I might have thought he was considering my words, but I could see the obstinate set of his jaw. "Because I believe your imagination ties Dickens to your brother, and those long afternoons where a small boy sat perched on the edge of his chair, so aware and so desperate for any key that might predict when he would next snap."
If Holmes’s body had spoken of resistance before, now he sat as a sentry on guard. But I have never wanted for courage in these situations, though perhaps more often with Holmes than with any other man, where the stakes are so high. "Holmes," I began. "Sherlock. You should know -- I have made my own investigations. What do you know about Sherrinford’s travel abroad?"
Holmes sat in silence, sharp-edged as a tempered blade. "I had my suspicions after you told me how he acted, that summer after his return. It reminded me too much of some men from my own regiment. So I had an old friend from my own days in Her Majesty’s service confirm my suspicions. Sherrinford was a commissioned cavalry officer in Johannesburg, and was sent into Rhodesia. He might have wanted to see a bit of the world, leave his mark on it in a way mere tourism would not allow, before he settled down to mind the family’s affairs in Cornwall. I do not know what he saw, of course, but I know the artillery sent into those conflicts. Mechanized guns with a truly fearsome power to take life. I can well imagine."
Sherlock sat in silence, shaking his head in disbelief. "That sentimental fool," he said, then --almost as if hearing the words for the first time once they’d left his lips-- hurried to add: "I mean no disrespect, Watson. It is a noble thing, I’m sure, and it certainly did you honor. You are a medical man, after all. Well trained. But he had no need to serve. Eldest son of a country squire -- he could have had the best education, the best of opportunities, just for the asking. Yet he went away, and then he came back like that."
"We Watsons were not destitute," I said, smiling gently. "And Scotland is not utterly bereft of universities. I could have made my way as a medical man, not so easily perhaps, but at less risk to my person than my chosen route offered. But what can I say? Men join up for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes it is just not logical. And whatever brought them into the service, however they got there, some see things that work their way into the blood as thoroughly as your foreign infiltrate. It is not always predictable, or controllable, and certainly not an easy topic of conversation for men who did not pass through the same crucible."
Holmes ran his hand through his hair and rubbed hard at the base of his skull, as if he could scrub this puzzle away. "What would you have me do?"
"First you will forget the mystery for the next hour," I said. "We will go out and have our tea, and fortify ourselves against this northern weather. And then you will ask Master Haynes your questions. There are other people we might talk to as well. Our Mister Lewis’s uncle, and his friends, if they can still be found. And we should ask Liza Smythe if she remembers anyone else who served on the organizing committee with her mother -- they might tell us more about Mrs. Peace. We can run other tests on your tissues, too, see if we can learn more about this mysterious gas."
"I do not see how it could help," Holmes said, but I could see his mood shifting ever so slightly, like clouds letting in the first half-beams of light after a thunderstorm. Still portending future rain, perhaps, but for the moment letting a bit of sun shine through.
"It may," I said. "Equally it may not. And you must reconcile yourself to the possibility that you may not know. But there are still avenues to explore. And even if it comes to that -- we might emulate our Mr. Lewis and admit our ignorance, should rational explanation evade us."
Holmes clapped my hand at that, and we rose together, making our way out toward the dining room.
We spent the next ten days in Cardiff, speaking with every witness we could find to those curious events. Mr. Lewis’s uncle even let us subject his hand to a mild electric current, a procedure I had seen demonstrated at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, and had been eager to try myself. But we made no more progress on the case of the unquiet dead, as Holmes had taken to calling it. Perhaps Mr. Dickens’s outlandish account was in fact true. Perhaps Mrs. Peace had been reanimated by one of those odd blue spirits he claimed to have witnessed and so had killed her own grandson without recognizing him as kin. Perhaps, too, Mr. Sneed had been murdered by them, his body thus inhabited; and brave Gwynneth had given her life to resist him, saving us all from their foul kind.
Equally, perhaps too much of the evidence has been lost to time, and a true account is simply impossible. I will follow Lewis’s lead here, and declare that I do not know.
We did extend our holiday, spending Holmes’s birthday with his brother at Caradon Hill. For two men with such a history and who had not spoken in so long, they struck me as souls with a natural kinship -- as brothers might. Mycroft was unable to join us, but I live in hope of future reunions, and the chance that I might be included. And while Holmes remembers little enough of his brother before he went to war, Sherrinford of course had a full stock of stories about Holmes’s earliest days. Never have I known a man to blush so deeply!
On a whim they started reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood, taking the parts in turn. Holmes insisted it might be relevant to our recent investigation. Charles Dickens was writing it shortly after the strange events in Cardiff; it might give some insight into his frame of mind; and so on. I suspect, of course, that that is for show, but should Holmes discover something further, I have no doubt the Strand will welcome his account.
Endnotes
Sherrinford is one of the great shared-headcanons in the Doyle fandom. The theory goes: Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes were descended from country squires, but were both free to make their way in London. Hence a third son tasked with managing the family’s affairs: Sherrinford. I’m not entirely convinced he must exist, but he’s certainly a fun concept to play with. What kind of relationship would he and Holmes have had, that he never so much as mentions him to Watson?
I’ve more or less lifted the "case" here from the Doctor Who episode "The Unquiet Dead," with a few minor additions. The "Cornish Horror" incident is the case at the center of "The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot." It’s my goal that people can enjoy this story without knowing much (if anything) about either, but both are well worth your time, if you get the chance to watch or read them.
The more devoted Whovians might notice a small inconsistency: the time-rift at Sneed’s house apparently harms humans, while Jack Harkness says (in “Boom Town”) that the rift is harmless to the human race. I suspect I could come up with a serious explanation to reconcile all this, but in true Whovian manner let’s just chalk it up to timey-wimeyness. It made for a better story.
My thanks to Tazlet, my receipient in the 2018 Summer Holstice for whom this is written, and of course to my two betas REDACTED and REDACTED. Tazlet asked for "crossovers and fusions” and “serious bonus points if the story touches on the liminal or literally crosses a boundary." To an old Whovian like myself, that really demanded this particular answer. I hope you enjoyed it!
Recipient: Tazlet
Author:
marta_beeBetas: ancientreader, lindahoyland
Verse: ACD Holmes
Characters/Pairings: Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, Mrs. Hudson, Sherrinford Holmes
Rating: PG
Warnings: adult themes related to mental illness and questionable (but period-appropriate) parenting
Summary: "I fear that if the matter is beyond humanity it is certainly beyond me." (The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot)
In which Holmes takes on an unsolvable case, and Watson makes some deductions of his own.
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With apologies to the proud residents of Cardiff town, present and past. In my defence Russell T. Davies went there first.
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On rare occasions, I feel obliged to relate a case without being able to offer a satisfactory resolution. This happens in fact more often than the written record would suggest because I often see little enough value in dwelling on Holmes’s failure, either in instructing the reader or even in providing a thrilling story for their enjoyment. But the case of the unquiet dead, as Holmes took to calling it, is worth remembering. Those familiar with my accounts would be forgiven to think Holmes some sort of calculating machine, where forensic detail is put in, computed upon by his remarkable mind, and out pops the correct conclusion so justice might be served, with no hint of bias or even perspective.
But Holmes is a man first and foremost, and though he is remarkably skilled at keeping the grit of sentiment from the lens that is his rational ability, any lens will have its own curvature, concave or convex and by some degree, and this too must be accounted for. I sometimes forget that myself, and it is good, I think, to remember.
The adventure began one quiet enough evening in early October, 1899. I sat at my desk, engrossed in a half-finished letter to my nephew Peter; Holmes was sitting at the table where we ate our meals, surrounded by his scrapbook-pages, his pot of glue, and piles of newspaper-clippings which I’m sure made sense to him, if him alone, laid out on every available surface.
"Is that it?" Holmes cried out. "Do you have it?"
I looked up in surprise, but Holmes’s questions had not been directed toward me. Mrs. Hudson had slipped in, unnoticed, and was now standing by the table, the tea-tray balanced against her hip. Certainly there wasn’t a clear surface large enough for the sugar pot, much less the full service and the plate of lemon biscuits she was eager to set down.
"Yes, yes," she answered, "though how you knew -- " Holmes fixed her with an accusatory gaze, or what would have passed as such between two people less well acquainted. After fourteen years with him as her lodger, she could hardly claim such surprise. A change in tack, then. "And how you can spot it so deep in my pocket, yet still not notice the sun’s passage across the sky and reason that this table must be put to other uses is beyond me." She waited for him to move a small pile of clippings to a new home of his choosing before setting down the biscuits in their place.
"And just what is ‘it’?" I asked as I stoppered my ink-pot and joined them at the table.
"Our esteemed Mrs. Hudson, or rather her equally esteemed brother --"
"Augie is a pawn-broker in Cardiff, and he’d not thank you for giving him such airs."
"My apologies. Our esteemed Mrs. Hudson, or rather her less-than-esteemed brother --"
That earned a smile. She set the tea service in my as-yet-unoccupied chair, then crossed the room to deposit her parcel on the ottoman before Holmes’s chair by the fire. "Augie bought it from an innkeeper in town. Named it ‘rubbish’ so he got a good price, though of course he knew better. Said it might be of some literary note. Though" -- here she nodded at the VR etched in bullet-holes along the far wall, and I wondered how infamous that story was among her relations and friends -- "though it was the more criminal elements he thought might spare my sitting-room walls another assault."
Holmes cocked his eyebrow at that and moved to open the parcel straight away but then he hesitated. "Some pleasures are better savored, don’t you agree?"
"And hot tea waits for no man," I said. He scowled at that, not unfondly, and started clearing the table in earnest.
"I’ll leave you gentlemen to it," Mrs. Hudson said. Then, leaning in closer, as conspirators might: "Abigail’s minding the bread alone, and she’s as like to burn it as not, poor dear. Dinner at seven?"
I nodded our agreement and thanks, and moved the tea-service to its more proper home on the now half-straightened table. Holmes, never one to leave a boundary untested or a last nerve untrodden, thought fit to issue her out in song:
"O Deus optime,
Salvum nunc facito,
Regem nostrum.
Sic laeta victoria
Comes et gloria,
Salvum iam facito ….."
I had hoped to share in the mystery of Holmes’s anticipated parcel. After tea, or after dinner perhaps. At a glance I could see it was a leather wallet of the sort couriers used to protect documents from the weather, thick enough for perhaps twenty sheets folded thrice; perhaps less. But that revealed nothing of their contents, and I could guess no more until Holmes chose to reveal it.
In the weeks that followed I thought back on that glimpse, recognizing the splotches indicative of a tanning process common in the Aberdeen of my youth but that hadn’t been fashionable for some decades, at least in London. An older wallet, then, but showing none of the normal signs of wear. Feasible: by Mrs. Hudson’s own account an innkeeper had sold it to a pawn-broker, and it could well have spent years in a box of abandoned property before at last it was sold. It told me little enough about the wallet’s contents, but I liked to believe Holmes would approve of the way I’d put his methods to work.
Though to have his judgment on that point he’d have to let me in and talk to me about the whole thing. At first he’d been all excitement, with not a hint of embarrassment or reserve, giving no indication the parcel was for his eyes only, but over tea our conversation had come to the letter I’d been answering. To my nephew Peter; I was sure he’d be married come spring, though he hadn’t yet admitted it, and thought Holmes might enjoy the clues that had led me to that conclusion.
Quite the contrary: whether the it was talk of marriage or of family generally, Holmes had grown distant, and when he came back to me he pressed his lips together tightly, as if guarding against some words that might slip past. Later, when we sat in our chairs after dinner, pipes in hand, he kept putting me off, dancing from one idle topic of conversation to another. The upcoming trial of the albino cobbler (how the barristers had mangled his pretty evidence!); or whether we could hope to obtain tickets when Balakirev played at the Royal Philharmonic (unlikely, barring a grateful client with sufficient connections). The papers remained untouched and uncommented-upon.
I knew when to leave well enough alone, and unlike some people, I could be intrigued by a mystery without it overwhelming all other considerations.
So I was quite surprised when he raised the question again some ten weeks later, completely unprompted by me. It was unseasonably warm for early December, and as both my patients and the cleverer members of London’s criminal classes had conspired to leave us alone, we’d decided on a stroll through Regent’s Park. The fresh air would do us both good, I judged: elm, beech, and cypress rather than the slaughtered holly and other evergreens with which Mrs. Hudson insisted on decking the halls seemed a welcome change. For my part I felt as content as a house-cat napping in a spot of sun, but Holmes resembled more closely the kitten with a feather held over-head, poised equally to pounce or flee at the first provocation.
"I thought I might go up to Cardiff for the new year," he said, apropos of nothing at all so far as I could tell. He effected a passable imitation of a smile. But …
"Cardiff? Really, Holmes?"
"Burges has done quite interesting work in his renovation of Castell Coch, I’ve heard."
"Cardiff," I repeated, as if tasting the word in my mouth. "Holmes, there is precisely nothing of interest in Cardiff." I could well understand his desire to leave London behind for a while; this new year, bringing with it a new century, had driven all of London’s least rational elements straight to our door, each one ready to attribute every creak in the attic floorboards to fae folk, disembodied spirits, or other agents supernatural. But there was Sussex, if he wished a change in location. Brighton. The Continent. Even Aberdeen; the future Mrs. Peter Watson would surely welcome a visit from the famous detective. If it were a professional obligation, he needn’t plan so far ahead, nor tempt me to Wales with talk of architecture. But there was perhaps one explanation.
"You wish to speak with Augie. Mrs. Hudson’s Augie; or his innkeeper-customer, perhaps." I smiled, wolf-like. "You found something in those papers. And they thought it would distract you in the absence of contemporary puzzles. What puzzle could possibly intrigue Sherlock Holmes? There is something -- criminal, in those papers, is there not?"
"Well spotted," Holmes said, his voice rich in feigned respect. Then, giving my arm a good-natured squeeze to assure me of his good humor, he continued, "You imagine a dowager’s jewels stolen out of her very house -- in Cardiff, Watson, truly? -- or murder most foul. Whereas I am as easily enthralled by those odd dancing men Hilton Cubitt found scrawled on his windowsill in Norfolk."
"And yet you let it rest until you guessed they were in true danger," I answered. "What have you found?"
"Murder, yes. Perhaps. A near forty-year-old murder, three of them in fact, if it’s more than a simple accident. The parties involved are likely dead themselves or scattered to the wind; but for my own peace, I would know the truth. And for the sake of bringing peace to the sister of the natural suspect, who seemed most eager to clear her brother’s name."
We made our way down the well-shaded walk as he laid out the essential facts for me. Emmanuel Peace, an accounts clerk with no enemies to speak of, had been found in the viewing room of the local mortuary, his hyoid bone broken -- a sure sign of strangulation -- and his body thrown against the table where his late grandmother had been laid out for her final dressing. Gwynneth Davies, his house-maid, and the boy employed to work his stables (an Evan Price, now deceased of cholera), were out in the yard, leaving Gabriel Sneed the undertaker alone in the house.
Naturally suspicion had fallen on Mr. Sneed. They had been alone in the house. He was newly deceased, and strangulation such a sudden way to die; it seemed unlikely (said the police reports) that someone could have escaped while he lay dying, or slipped out of the house unnoticed before Mr. Sneed claimed to have found the corpse. And Sneed was an undertaker, grisly work. Men drawn to it often had a certain temperament, didn’t they? (I thought of my own father, a butcher who’d had the spark of insight to sell organs from the higher mammals to medical schools when human cadavers were not forthcoming. How rarely those reputations were well-earned!) But Sneed had no motive and quite a lot to lose by assaulting a grieving relative in his own house. And he was a quiet man by all counts: widowed, a regular parishioner at St. Mary’s. Respectable.
And he was equally dead come morning. A gas line had exploded in the mortuary, wreaking all manner of havoc on the town’s recently departed and leaving two fresh corpses to add to their number: Sneed with his head caved in from a fallen ceiling-beam, and Gwynneth apparently dead from the fire itself. Price had insisted Master Sneed simply could not have done what they said. That he’d not hurt a fly, much less Gwynneth, for all his dour ways, and that the lights had been flickering in recent weeks anyway. Likely there was something wrong with the gas. And with neither suspected killers nor witnesses left to interview, the official investigation had petered out rather quietly. Even so, thirty-nine years later, people still would talk.
"This all happened so long ago,” I said after Holmes completed his account. “Some might say time’s passage has made it near unsolvable.” Holmes nodded noncommittally. "No clues to be found after all this time, no future crimes to be prevented. No innocent man sitting in prison unjustly for all these years." He did not answer me; half turned away. "What aren’t you telling me, Holmes?"
"The account -- our best source of information here, aside from the official reports which make Scotland Yard’s seem positively helpful -- is from the famous Charles Dickens."
Now that was a feature of interest, as one says, but it hardly explained his interest. If anything it raised more questions. "And you put your faith in the account of a novelist?"
"Certain details led me to believe him. Claims borne out in the official records, which he would have no way of knowing if he were not also a witness. And Dickens was in town that night, engaged for a dramatic reading of his Christmas Carol, but he was noticeably absent from his scheduled encore recitation the following evening. He’d left town on a midnight train, with no notice or explanation, and was next seen a week later in Gads Hill. Something unnerved him, certainly." Holmes shrugged at that. He never shrugged, rarely left his meaning to so imprecise an instrument. "I see no reason to disbelieve his account."
"Fair enough," I said. "But that does not account for your interest."
"I have a brother." As if that explained it. "Not Mycroft; another one. Sherrinford. We are not close."
"So it would seem."
"He manages an old country estate, in Cornwall. At Caradon Hill, not far from the old copper-mines. They did well enough in my father’s day, but with the mine’s decline - well. More mouths and less coin to go around. Not an uncommon story, I’m sure. He keeps the old place solvent, no small achievement; and he frees Mycroft and myself from our familial duties."
Holmes opened his mouth again, as if to say something more, but then he closed it without further comment. "We were in Cornwall two years ago," I prodded him. "The Cornish Horror." Still Holmes walked in silence, his attention singularly focused on a goldfinch perched in a cypress-branch some small distance off. "You never mentioned that you had a brother."
"And I never mentioned the garroting I once investigated in Bethnal Green," he said peevishly, "just because we we happened to be in Trafalgar Square. The Holmes-stead was nearly two days’ away by hansom."
That was just the kind of word-play Holmes knew I loved to engage in, but I would not be distracted by his bauble. "We’d have made it in one by train," I said. "Less still if we’d hired one of those new mechanised carriages you’ve been keen to try."
"And why were we in Cornwall to begin with? You had said my nerves needed a rest. Do you really believe a visit with a brother I’ve not spoken to in some three decades would have served that purpose well?" Thinking on my own rare meetings with Harry, I was hard-pressed to disagree, but I would not let him off the hook so easily by admitting it. A long silent pause, the air as thick with expectations as our rooms in Baker Street had been with the scent of fir, until at last:
"Sherrinford and I do not -- we do not do well together. He sees to things at home. He kept me in tuition and tobacco when I was younger, enabling me to prolong my studies in a way I never would have had I needed to pay my own fees, until I was the curious man you found me on our first meeting." Another stab at word-play, a shiny distraction to pull me from the present course, but I let it pass.
"He." Holmes frowned. "He is, and I always thought that enough. I did not know him well -- he went abroad for a while when I was quite young, and when he came back …. well, he was not fit for Bedlam, but he was in a sorry state, that much even I could see. He would sit for hours, in near total stillness, only to break it with these sudden bursts of energy. Mycroft was a year away from university, and he was locked away in his room with his studies, most days. There was a concern, too, that Sherrinford would be less …. restrained than he was around me. My parents thought it would do him good, to have reason to hold himself in check. I don’t doubt they thought I’d be safe, and that I’d give our poor harried mother some respite while I sat with him. But even so."
The silence returned, this time much less intentional. We’d long since passed our goldfinch but still Holmes stared down the path, unseeing. "Mycroft is seven years your senior," I said at last, "and Sherrinford …."
"Ten his." Then, in answer to the unvoiced question: "He was twenty-five; I was eight."
"By Jove, Holmes."
"I had a way about me," Holmes said, whether in explanation or defense even now I am not sure. "I acted older than my age, and often had even myself fooled. And Sherrinford never laid a hand upon me. I would sit by the window and read to him. Dickens, clearly. I did the voices, you see; it drew him out of himself better than most anything else, and it gave me a raft to cling to. It was summer, and I had the afternoons to fill; or to be filled for me, at our mother’s insistence. I most remember the rooms being unbearably still, and wishing I could escape to my chemistry set."
He shrugged again, the second time inside a quarter-hour. It unnerved me, but I let it pass. "It was the unpredictability of it all more than anything. I quite liked rule and order, even then.” In an obvious (some might say artless, for him) effort to lighten our conversation he added, "But I quite liked doing the voices -- well, you said once that the stage lost a great talent when I took up the investigative sciences. We did Great Expectations, and Bleak House, and were well started on David Copperfield, when the new school year began."
At last the disparate strands were starting to come together, Holmes’s interest in that particular author and his reluctance to let me in once confronted with the papers’ arrival, his drive to make rational sense of the mysterious deaths and his growing irritation with the superstitious turn so much of London had taken with the approaching century’s end. I would make my own investigations into this family history, but I could do that on my own time and in my own way. "Very well," I said, wrinkling my nose in exaggerated disgust. "To Cardiff."
"As if you would have other plans," Holmes said. Then, affected as an afterthought: "And Sherrinford is not the mystery we are investigating."
"So you say," I said. "I’m sure Wales is lovely at the year’s end."
We did not speak of the matter for some two weeks after, though I knew by the telegrams and mail that his own investigation continued apace. For myself, I wrote to Bill Murray, still employed with the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers after all those years, to confirm a suspicion I had about Holmes’s brother. But one Tuesday evening, perhaps a week before Christmas, Holmes made it quite impossible for me to ignore our official case any longer.
"Bar the doors!" Holmes cried out as I entered our rooms. "This city is overrun by fools."
"What, that nice man I passed on the stair?"
"That ‘nice man,’ as you name him, tried to convince me his milkman was a vampire. Simply because he spoke with a Romanian accent and had ever-so-slightly pointed teeth."
"You scared him," I said, willfully putting off comment on Holmes’s other claims. I will admit it: I derive more pleasure than perhaps I should from pushing him to irritation (in small quantities, at least). But then I have never claimed to be a good man.
"Bloody vampires. They do not even turn milk," Holmes said. Then he scowled. "Or there are no myths about them turning milk; you know my meaning." He threw himself back along the couch in a fit of pique. "This city has gone utterly insane."
"That implies a change in its basic state," I said. Holding out the envelope Mrs. Hudson had entrusted to me, I added, "Post for you. A Mrs. Smythe of Cardiff."
Holmes looked up at that. "Ah. Her mother helped organize the Dickens reading, and she was on hand collecting tickets. She is the closest I have found to a witness for that part of Mr. Dickens’s account."
"It is most outlandish," I said, remembering the portion Holmes referenced. Mrs. Peace, the very same who had been laid out in Sneed’s morgue, according to the official accounts, had turned up at the theater. Opening the letter, I read its contents quickly. "Ms. Smythe confirms she received Mrs. Peace’s ticket -- it is well documented in her ledger -- and that the old lady sat quietly, not unlike the other guests in attendance, until Mr. Dickens at last reached the appearance of Marley’s ghost in Scrooge’s door-knocker. Then she let out ‘a hellish scream, and emitted a great cloud of blue gas from her mouth, which hovered overhead for some long moments before finally escaping into a nearby gas lamp.’"
"Oh, humbug!" Holmes exclaimed. Sitting up, he took the letter from my hand and skimmed it. "I thought she might shed some light on the affair. A mask made to look like a dead woman, blue vapor released on cue from a box hidden under her chair: a trained illusionist could certainly manage it. And it gave the audience a thrill; more than the full reading would have, I’d imagine. The organizing committee might have arranged it beforehand. But Mrs. Smythe says she knew of no such plan, and she can hardly believe her mother would have been involved in any such affair. The elder Mrs. Smythe was apparently the height of propriety. Her daughter, our Liza, on the other hand, describes herself as ‘quite the rapscallion in those days,’ and she’d gladly have played her part in the bit of excitement, if she’d been made aware."
"But surely that would serve Gabriel Sneed’s case. If Mrs. Peace was alive when her grandson was murdered -- "
"There. Are. No. Ghosts," Holmes said, punctuating each word with his fist against the wall. He rubbed peevishly at his temple; I would have to have Mrs. Hudson brew him some ginger-root tea, lest he reach for stronger medicines. "No spirits wandering the streets of Cardiff so they might see the great author. No, Watson: she was declared dead some six hours prior. No breath, no pulse, no movement in her eyes to suggest she was at all aware of those around her. I have her certificate of death from the police. If this case’s resolution lies beyond the established laws of nature, then how I’m to manage it, I’m quite unsure."
Those words were so similar to ones Holmes had spoken two years ago, in Cornwall. They were etched in my brain, as unalterable as ink on parchment. So much of that case had proved unforgettable to me, it was all so ghastly, ghoulish even. But Holmes seemed comparatively unaffected by it once we returned to London; or else he hid its effects from me quite expertly. I wondered: was he quoting himself intentionally, or had the episode simply weighed so heavily on his brain of late, those old words came back to him of their own volition.
Holmes had set aside the inconsistencies that time, had even taken me arrowhead-hunting on the beach. I thought of the Mesolithic flint-scraper in my old army-chest, along with my army medals and souvenirs of our other adventures together, and one of Mary’s six pearls from Sholto. Memento mortis; or memento mori? And how well would Holmes have managed it, had the answer not been so quickly discoverable? If the case had persisted for weeks or months rather than mere days? Even with the mystery less than a day old, he’d sat up all night filling our rented rooms with tobacco-smoke and peering out into the inky darkness.
"Perhaps she simply didn’t know of the plan," I allowed. "Liza Smythe. What is your next step?"
"An Inspector Hughes with the Cardiff police force has offered to send me some tissue samples they retained from the explosion. Yes, after all these years; some in their office have a modicum of competence. The samples are sure to be dessicated, possibly worse, but I will run what tests I can on them and see if they at last yield more light than smoke."
"For my part I wish to speak with this Mrs. Smythe," I said. "You can never know what she has forgotten, or held back on purpose. And Augie Hudson as well. If Dickens’s account is our best source of information, I would know all I can about the circumstances surrounding its discovery."
"Good man," Holmes said. He offered me a wry grin. "Are you sure I cannot tempt you into starting our journey early? If our clerk with the vampire-milkman is any indication, I could be persuaded to leave London tonight."
"Would that we could," I laughed. "But I have patients still, and you still owe the grocer’s bill. And we have social duties as well: Mycroft has asked us round to his club tonight for Christmas drinks. Are you sure you won’t join us?"
Holmes, doing his best impression of a fainting heroine from a penny novel, threw himself back into the couch cushions, letting the letter drop to the floor.
The next ten days were crammed full of festivities both professional and social for Holmes and myself, and Christmas drinks (twice rescheduled) with Holmes’s brother Mycroft that somehow fit neatly into both categories. Holmes himself begged pardon on that occasion, claiming a winter’s cold that was much improved by the next morning. Finally we were free -- to be locked in a small train compartment with a three-hundred-pound accounts clerk with a truly appalling case of halitosis. That night, though, saw us ensconced in our rooms in Cardiff.
Then came the necessary interviews: with the retired police inspector, who had dismissed so readily the possibility of an unapprehended intruder in Sneed’s mortuary; with the Widow Wellington, the neighbor from across the road who had seen a man matching the great Mister Dickens’s description, along with his odd companion dressed in a natty jumper and trousers and not much else. And of course with Augie Hudson, who asked after our health and his sister’s and then promptly directed us to Ian Lewis, a jack-of-all-trades at the very inn where we were staying, who had sold him the documents.
"I’m sure it’s just as the papers say," Lewis said once we were gathered in a store-room at the inn. Said it repeatedly, and without volunteering much else. To go through all this trouble, to wait so long, all to be confounded by a witness who would not do us the courtesy of telling his story. It was maddening!
I mustered as warm a smile as I could manage. "Mr. Lewis. You clearly know something of Mr. Holmes." He nodded, threatening to bite his lip plain through. "You have read my stories?"
Another nod. "We’re not so uncultured as all that. I’ve read The Strand."
"So you know, to Mr. Holmes, the smallest detail can often prove invaluable." Still he hesitated. He was too young to be a genuine suspect, of course, but he was certainly holding something back. "If there is anything you can add," I urged him, "something you might have thought trivial at the time perhaps, we would be most grateful."
Holmes, his patience evidently worn thin, leaned forward and steepled his long, precise fingers under his chin. "Mr. Augustus Hudson, the pawn-broker, directed us to you and not to your master. Why might that be?"
"I’m sure I don’t know!" Lewis protested, and Holmes tapped his fingers together, as regular and unyielding as a musician’s metronome. At last something in Lewis’s expression broke. "But I’ve done nothing wrong, sir," he said, "nothing of consequence, surely."
"Perhaps you had better tell us the whole story, then," I said.
He took a steadying breath. "Often enough guests will leave some small possession behind," he began at last. "We hold on to it for a time, and if it remains unclaimed, the more valuable pieces Master Haynes turns over to your Mr. Hudson. It’s his by rights if it lays unclaimed for six weeks, and we get a high enough class of guests, they won’t always send for their bits and bobs. The less worthy items he gives me to dispose of as I see fit. Well. I thought if he could earn some coin off our customers’ carelessness every now and again, so might I. Every little bit helps, after all." He puffed out his chest a bit at his own cleverness. "Mr. Hudson gave me a pound ten shilling for the whole box."
"Not so little a bit, then," I noted.
"I never thought to hear of those oddments again. And I still don’t see as I’ve done anything wrong, by selling them. But there is something else."
There often was. Beside me, Holmes leaned back in his chair, adopting a more welcoming stance. For my part I met the man’s gaze, inviting him to look at me and ignore Holmes for the moment, judging that of the two of us, even in my irritation I must be the less imposing audience. "You seem a decent man," I said. "I’m sure you’ve done nothing to warrant such discomfort."
"I’ve done no more than follow my master’s lead," he said, a little defensively. "It’s just this isn’t as fine a part of town as it was thirty years ago, and it’s harder to fill all the beds. The affair with Mrs. Peace, with Mr. Sneed -- it’s a bit of a local legend, you see, and we’re so near the lecture hall where it all started. So I bang on the pipes now and again, or move the guests’ tobacco-pipes from the hearth to on top of the bureau when I go in to light the fires. Just enough to keep the town talking."
He looked Holmes straight in the eye in a bout of courage I would have thought him incapable of. "I don’t believe in ghosts, sir. I can’t explain what happened with Mrs. Peace. It’s just a good bit of custom. And Master Haynes wouldn’t thank me for ruining his scheme." Beside me I saw Holmes pressing his lips together, a barely-suppressed smile threatening to show itself. People really could be such fools. "And it really is just as the paper says. I’d only add Mr. Dickens left earlier than planned, and at an odd hour: returned to his rooms past ten and did not settle his account until near three in the morning. He left the very night Mrs. Peace was --well-- spotted."
"What of the paper itself?" I asked. "Is this the kind you have on-hand?"
Lewis picked up a sheet and held it to the lamp. "No; we’ve had our own stock printed, blank but with a watermark in the corner. This looks to be Mr. Dickens’s own stock. Though the case you brought it in -- now that is odd! We use one of a similar style for our post. Sell them to the guests, too, when they ask for them. You should ask Master Haynes to be certain, but Mr. Dickens may have bought that off us. Odd, that he’d go to such trouble and still leave his writings behind and not send for them after."
Holmes hummed in agreement. "Your theory, Watson, that Dickens meant these records to be found gains some credence. Mister Lewis, have you any idea why the papers only came to light now, nearly forty years later?"
"Master Haynes said he found it some few months ago, wedged between the back of his old desk and the wall." He pointed to a sharp crease in the leather. "See how the case was shoved flat for so long. The old desk is a great oak monstrosity, and there was hardly any cause to move it, to clean the wall behind, until he bought him a new piece -- smaller, to accommodate the second file drawer, you see -- this last June. I don’t believe he held it back on purpose, if that’s your thought."
"Perhaps," Holmes said. "Well, Mister Lewis: I believe I am satisfied for the moment, though I may have more questions later. Will you give us the room for a few moments? I would discuss matters with Watson. And tell your master we would like to clarify a few points with him as well, when he will speak to us."
"Of course, sirs." Lewis rose to exit but paused at the door. "Perhaps it means nothing, but you, Mr. Watson, told me to hold nothing back. It was the queerest thing. My uncle was one of the men who helped clear away the wreckage, looking for survivors that night after the mortuary exploded. A horrible business, to hear him describe it: limbs blown off their owners, and the smell of charred flesh all about.
"So I thought, when he told me the story as a boy years later, perhaps his imagination was run away with him. But there were some details I couldn’t so easily dismiss. His two friends with whom he was sharing rooms, they all went in to that scene together. They all worked for the railway and so their watches were set to the station-clock, within a second of each other; yet when they came out of that house, my uncle’s was forty-seven seconds ahead, and his friends’ more than a minute behind: one minute seventeen for the one, and one minute thirty-two for the other’s. And they were all in good enough health before, but they all came out the worse, and in such different ways as well: blinding headaches for one, and the other coughing up green phlegm for a month. My uncle got the worst of it, his hand mangled as if it had been caught in a vise though he swore nothing of the sort had happened."
"That is of interest," Holmes said. "Were there any theories at the time?"
"All three saw a doctor, of course, and he said there must have been some sort of gas in the air. But you are both men of science. Have you ever heard of such a thing? That three men might be so affected in different ways, with no one showing any sign of the other men’s maladies? And their watches mis-set like that without the gears being damaged, or the cases or chains come to that?"
"Chemical gases can have odd effects," I said. "It may come to nothing, but we will certainly investigate, and will let you know what comes of it. Who occupies the mortuary now?"
"The space is left empty," Lewis said. "They tore the house down, but no one would take the lot. And I meant what I said, Mr. Watson. I truly don’t believe in spirits. Even when I don’t have a better explanation, talk of ghosts and such seems to raise more questions than it answers; I’d rather say I just don’t know. Still, when I sit and think about it, that affair with the watches does make me wonder, sometimes." And before either Holmes or I could answer, he nodded his courtesy and slipped out the door.
"Ghosts again," Holmes said derisively. "This whole case seems shot through with them. And for all this affair seemed a way to escape the lure of supernatural explanations that has so gripped our clients in London."
"Some elements seem clearer than before. The fact that Lewis banged on the pipes explains so many of those odd stories you received from Liza Smythe. Master Haynes may not have been the only merchant to exploit the story for his own gain. It seems likelier than ever that Mrs. Peace died of a stroke, as the doctor’s reports indicate, and that Mrs. Smythe was simply unaware of the trick being played. And those injuries young Lewis described could speak to a strange gas in the house, though it is singular that the symptoms were specific to each man. Perhaps Sneed did kill Emmanuel Peace, and perhaps his own death and Gwynneth’s were unrelated. It is a better explanation than ghosts from another world, as Dickens claimed."
"Or perhaps Miss Davies witnessed something that Sneed wished to remain hidden, and in trying to silence her he caused his own death as well. Or perhaps there was some other party at work in their deaths. But that is not the story as Charles Dickens relates it, and he was so sure of what he saw! You saw it in his writing, of course, but look how he canceled his engagements and rushed home to his family. And how he took those hours to record what he saw, preserved the pages so they’d be found, even when his account could well make him appear the fool. To write of ghosts wandering the streets of Cardiff; or worse yet, beings from another planet!"
"It could have been the gas," I said, though even as I said it I knew I was grasping at straws. "Headaches, nerve damage, brachial trauma -- who is to say it might not have other queer effects?"
"The watches bother me as well," he said. "That the gears were undamaged - their watches could only become unsynchronized if they reset them manually. But to what end? Why lie?" He rubbed at his chin, a gesture I had come to associate with him considering various options, and I rather suspected I was not going to like what came next.
"We could make a trial," Holmes ventured at last. "We could go back to the house -- "
"No, Holmes."
"Likely the gas has fully dissipated, after all these years, but if we could replicate -- "
"No, Holmes," I insisted. "You really have so little regard for your own health, and for mine? Either there will be no effect of any kind after all these years, in which case we gain nothing; or else you risk a wholly unpredictable effect. We could well die." I did not say: I thought you would have learned this lesson in Cornwall, that my near death would have had a longer-lasting impact even if you cared not about your own.
"And do not suggest you could go in alone, carry my watch in your pocket and take the risk solely on yourself. Losing you again would be worse still." I knew I was venturing dangerously into the sentimental, into those things we always left unsaid, but his determination to know at all costs was leaving me rather unnerved.
"I do not like not knowing," Holmes said after a moment’s silence. His tone was quiet; apologetic, almost, but still determined. "And there are things in need of explanation beyond just the queer yet oddly consistent testimonies. I ran my tests on those tissue samples sent down by the Cardiff police, as you know. I did not want to mention my findings until their own forensic scientists verified them; now I know that they have. You remember the hematology test I had just devised, that first afternoon when Stanford introduced us in the labs at St. Bart’s all those years ago? I subjected the sample from Gwynneth Davies to my tests, with the expected results. There was blood enough, even after all so much time had passed.
"But Sneed’s! I extracted proteins from some samples of his hair they sent down, and they too were unremarkable, but his blood, Watson, his blood! It failed my blood-tests entirely, had none of the normal proteins that might differentiate, say, human from bovine blood,, and when I rehydrated it, introduced a reactive agent to break the compounds into their constitutive parts and ran it through my centrifuge, a strange precipitate fell out. It was of a similar weight to antimony, but with none of the usual properties. I have never seen anything of the kind, organic or otherwise, and his blood was rich with it. It was thoroughly bonded with his hemoglobin; a more poetic man might call it a part of him."
"The sample could have been polluted. Or your tests could have been wrong."
"And Llewellyn’s, the man with the Cardiff force? And in light of Dickens’ account? Watson, I do not like not knowing."
I threw up my hands in despair. "Then you had best get used to it! I will grant you, there are some puzzles worth unravelling, but not at the cost of our lives. Your life, Holmes. Why is it so important to you to know? You have had other cases you could not solve before."
"We have been foiled by a lack of evidence. Gaps in our understanding we could not fill. This is different, though, is it not? Here we have a witness, a credible man whom I have every reason to believe, save that what he is claiming cannot possibly be true. Spirits from another world! And empirical facts that cannot be explained -- an infiltrate in the blood, and all this queer behavior."
"And if our witness were not the famous author, but were someone less renowned, and less a figure in your personal past? Say, Evan Price, the stable-boy, who was certainly better situated to comment on his master’s behavior, were he still alive?" Holmes sat mutely. Someone who knew him less well than I might have thought he was considering my words, but I could see the obstinate set of his jaw. "Because I believe your imagination ties Dickens to your brother, and those long afternoons where a small boy sat perched on the edge of his chair, so aware and so desperate for any key that might predict when he would next snap."
If Holmes’s body had spoken of resistance before, now he sat as a sentry on guard. But I have never wanted for courage in these situations, though perhaps more often with Holmes than with any other man, where the stakes are so high. "Holmes," I began. "Sherlock. You should know -- I have made my own investigations. What do you know about Sherrinford’s travel abroad?"
Holmes sat in silence, sharp-edged as a tempered blade. "I had my suspicions after you told me how he acted, that summer after his return. It reminded me too much of some men from my own regiment. So I had an old friend from my own days in Her Majesty’s service confirm my suspicions. Sherrinford was a commissioned cavalry officer in Johannesburg, and was sent into Rhodesia. He might have wanted to see a bit of the world, leave his mark on it in a way mere tourism would not allow, before he settled down to mind the family’s affairs in Cornwall. I do not know what he saw, of course, but I know the artillery sent into those conflicts. Mechanized guns with a truly fearsome power to take life. I can well imagine."
Sherlock sat in silence, shaking his head in disbelief. "That sentimental fool," he said, then --almost as if hearing the words for the first time once they’d left his lips-- hurried to add: "I mean no disrespect, Watson. It is a noble thing, I’m sure, and it certainly did you honor. You are a medical man, after all. Well trained. But he had no need to serve. Eldest son of a country squire -- he could have had the best education, the best of opportunities, just for the asking. Yet he went away, and then he came back like that."
"We Watsons were not destitute," I said, smiling gently. "And Scotland is not utterly bereft of universities. I could have made my way as a medical man, not so easily perhaps, but at less risk to my person than my chosen route offered. But what can I say? Men join up for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes it is just not logical. And whatever brought them into the service, however they got there, some see things that work their way into the blood as thoroughly as your foreign infiltrate. It is not always predictable, or controllable, and certainly not an easy topic of conversation for men who did not pass through the same crucible."
Holmes ran his hand through his hair and rubbed hard at the base of his skull, as if he could scrub this puzzle away. "What would you have me do?"
"First you will forget the mystery for the next hour," I said. "We will go out and have our tea, and fortify ourselves against this northern weather. And then you will ask Master Haynes your questions. There are other people we might talk to as well. Our Mister Lewis’s uncle, and his friends, if they can still be found. And we should ask Liza Smythe if she remembers anyone else who served on the organizing committee with her mother -- they might tell us more about Mrs. Peace. We can run other tests on your tissues, too, see if we can learn more about this mysterious gas."
"I do not see how it could help," Holmes said, but I could see his mood shifting ever so slightly, like clouds letting in the first half-beams of light after a thunderstorm. Still portending future rain, perhaps, but for the moment letting a bit of sun shine through.
"It may," I said. "Equally it may not. And you must reconcile yourself to the possibility that you may not know. But there are still avenues to explore. And even if it comes to that -- we might emulate our Mr. Lewis and admit our ignorance, should rational explanation evade us."
Holmes clapped my hand at that, and we rose together, making our way out toward the dining room.
We spent the next ten days in Cardiff, speaking with every witness we could find to those curious events. Mr. Lewis’s uncle even let us subject his hand to a mild electric current, a procedure I had seen demonstrated at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, and had been eager to try myself. But we made no more progress on the case of the unquiet dead, as Holmes had taken to calling it. Perhaps Mr. Dickens’s outlandish account was in fact true. Perhaps Mrs. Peace had been reanimated by one of those odd blue spirits he claimed to have witnessed and so had killed her own grandson without recognizing him as kin. Perhaps, too, Mr. Sneed had been murdered by them, his body thus inhabited; and brave Gwynneth had given her life to resist him, saving us all from their foul kind.
Equally, perhaps too much of the evidence has been lost to time, and a true account is simply impossible. I will follow Lewis’s lead here, and declare that I do not know.
We did extend our holiday, spending Holmes’s birthday with his brother at Caradon Hill. For two men with such a history and who had not spoken in so long, they struck me as souls with a natural kinship -- as brothers might. Mycroft was unable to join us, but I live in hope of future reunions, and the chance that I might be included. And while Holmes remembers little enough of his brother before he went to war, Sherrinford of course had a full stock of stories about Holmes’s earliest days. Never have I known a man to blush so deeply!
On a whim they started reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood, taking the parts in turn. Holmes insisted it might be relevant to our recent investigation. Charles Dickens was writing it shortly after the strange events in Cardiff; it might give some insight into his frame of mind; and so on. I suspect, of course, that that is for show, but should Holmes discover something further, I have no doubt the Strand will welcome his account.
Endnotes
Sherrinford is one of the great shared-headcanons in the Doyle fandom. The theory goes: Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes were descended from country squires, but were both free to make their way in London. Hence a third son tasked with managing the family’s affairs: Sherrinford. I’m not entirely convinced he must exist, but he’s certainly a fun concept to play with. What kind of relationship would he and Holmes have had, that he never so much as mentions him to Watson?
I’ve more or less lifted the "case" here from the Doctor Who episode "The Unquiet Dead," with a few minor additions. The "Cornish Horror" incident is the case at the center of "The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot." It’s my goal that people can enjoy this story without knowing much (if anything) about either, but both are well worth your time, if you get the chance to watch or read them.
The more devoted Whovians might notice a small inconsistency: the time-rift at Sneed’s house apparently harms humans, while Jack Harkness says (in “Boom Town”) that the rift is harmless to the human race. I suspect I could come up with a serious explanation to reconcile all this, but in true Whovian manner let’s just chalk it up to timey-wimeyness. It made for a better story.
My thanks to Tazlet, my receipient in the 2018 Summer Holstice for whom this is written, and of course to my two betas REDACTED and REDACTED. Tazlet asked for "crossovers and fusions” and “serious bonus points if the story touches on the liminal or literally crosses a boundary." To an old Whovian like myself, that really demanded this particular answer. I hope you enjoyed it!
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Date: 2018-06-10 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-10 07:08 pm (UTC)I must also just mention a few lines that particularly stood out for me:
But Holmes is a man first and foremost, and though he is remarkably skilled at keeping the grit of sentiment from the lens that is his rational ability, any lens will have its own curvature, concave or convex and by some degree, and this too must be accounted for.
Holmes, never one to leave a boundary untested or a last nerve untrodden, thought fit to issue her out in song… (Followed by the National Anthem in Latin, which seems so right for Holmes ^__^)
The fresh air would do us both good, I judged: elm, beech, and cypress rather than the slaughtered holly and other evergreens with which Mrs. Hudson insisted on decking the halls seemed a welcome change. For my part I felt as content as a house-cat napping in a spot of sun, but Holmes resembled more closely the kitten with a feather held over-head, poised equally to pounce or flee at the first provocation.
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Date: 2018-06-11 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-11 10:55 pm (UTC)But Holmes is a man first and foremost, and though he is remarkably skilled at keeping the grit of sentiment from the lens that is his rational ability, any lens will have its own curvature, concave or convex and by some degree, and this too must be accounted for. I sometimes forget that myself, and it is good, I think, to remember.
And this bit made me laugh right out loud-
Holmes, never one to leave a boundary untested or a last nerve untrodden, thought fit to issue her out in song...
Thank you for sharing this!
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Date: 2018-06-16 04:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-19 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-20 06:24 pm (UTC)by taking ACD Holmes and Who, Charles Dickens (a man who knew his way around a semicolon) and a cold case mystery, The Devil’s foot and a bit of fanon, adding an authentic touch of the times and plaiting it all together in a highly readable story, you have earned all the bonus points.
It’s a rare writer in any genre who can evoke an authentic sense of mystery, but you succeeded; add it to my delight in Watson’s pawky* sense humor.
There is only one thing; I don’t know if you meant to or not but, with this bit—
"Bar the doors!" Holmes cried out as I entered our rooms. "This city is overrun by fools."
"What, that nice man I passed on the stair?"
"That ‘nice man,’ as you name him, tried to convince me his milkman was a vampire. Simply because he spoke with a Romanian accent and had ever-so-slightly pointed teeth."
—I thought you were alluding to Saberhagen’s ‘Holmes-Dracula File’ and might serve up ‘The Case of the Romanian Milkman’, definitely a tale for which the world is not yet ready. Sadly, it was not to be, but if you would like to write it, you’ll have at least one happy reader.
*sly, mischievous