“ ‘Because my brother Mycroft possesses it in a larger degree than I do.’ ”
This was the only time, in hundreds of thousands of words “chronicled by Watson”, that Holmes will ever mention his ancestors. It was the first time he ever mentioned the existence of his brother Mycroft, and Watson was duly astonished.
Yet nothing in this short “revelation” to Dr. Watson by Sherlock Holmes, other than Mycroft’s existence, was true in any real sense: not even the simple fact of his “grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist”.
There was, of course, a well-known French artist of the era, Émile Jean-Horace Vernet (1789–1863), whose specialty was painting scenes of battle and Orientalist-Arab subjects. Vernet’s most-remembered painting in Holmes’s and Watson’s time (and in ours) was his large canvas titled Street Fighting on Rue Soufflot, Paris, June 25, 1848. If Vernet is remembered for any utterance today it is from the time when a patron asked him to remove the image of an especially obnoxious general from one of his battle paintings. “I am a painter of history, sire,” Vernet is reported to have said, “and I will not violate the truth.”
But Holmes, in his recitation to Watson, certainly violated the truth; Émile Jean-Horace Vernet had three brothers and one younger sister who died of typhus when she was 7 years old. She could hardly have been Sherlock Holmes’s grandmother.
William Sherlock Holmes had been born in the Eastside slums of London and had spent the majority of his young years in those slums and on those rough streets. When the older Holmes summoned his barefoot, ragamuffin group of “street Arabs”—his Baker Street Irregulars, as he called them—he might as well have been summoning his much-younger self.
Future biographers will state with certainty, among other “known facts”, that Holmes’s father was either an invalided-out cavalry lieutenant named Siger Holmes or a member of the landed gentry named William Scott Holmes. Neither account has an ounce of truth to it. One famous biography of the Great Detective will have Sherlock’s father and the Holmes family inheriting a Yorkshire estate called “Mycroft” and will trace the family ownership of that grand estate back to the 1550’s.
This is nonsense and wholly manufactured. Holmes’s actual family once had partial claim to some acres of land in Yorkshire, but it was a non-producing hardscrabble farm during Queen Elizabeth’s reign and had been under the mere hired-management of Sherlock’s uncle for only a few years when that man died in 1860, two years after Sherlock’s mother—of whom the adult detective had no clear memory—died of consumption in an Eastcheap boarding house.
It’s true that the Yorkshire farm once had held some delusions of grandeur. In the sixteenth century the nobleman owner—who was not an ancestor of Sherlock Holmes—had begun work on a grand country house there that was to be known as “Ashcroft Manor”. But the nobleman had made the mistake of remaining a practicing Catholic when England had been converted, forcibly when necessary, to the Church of England, and by 1610 “Ashcroft Manor” had been burned to ashes and equally vanished were the fortune and hopes of the noble squire who had so briefly owned the land. History reports that the lord cut his own throat; he had no male descendants who lived beyond the age of 11.
In centuries to come, some Yorkshire locals still referred to the ever-dwindling estate—dwindling due to inevitable entailment of Commons and larger and larger sections being sold off to pay debts by the distant relatives who’d assumed ownership of the farm—as “Ashcroft Farm”, but by 1800 the appellation had become “Ash Heap Acres” after the chimneys and windowless brick buildings of a profitless lead mine that had been built on the remaining 60 acres in a last-ditch effort by an American cousin to earn some money from the place. Until the lead works closed down in 1838, “Ash Heap Acres” often filled the entire Yorkshire valley with a thick, dark cloud of unhealthy lead-laced smoke.
After the death of Sherlock’s uncle Sherrinford in 1860—he had been administering Ash Heap Acres for an absentee Birmingham landlord—Sherlock’s father had bought (at far too high a price) that over-mined and overgrown Yorkshire farm and then brought the 13-year-old Mycroft and 6-year-old Sherlock out to the remaining 38 acres of ruined woodland, unyielding fields, grazed-out pastures, and polluted swamp. Mycroft never left his small room while there, but the farm—what was left of it—was an exploratory and play-filled heaven to the young Sherlock. He even had a swaybacked pony to ride during those three golden years in the Yorkshire Dales.
But by early 1863, Sherlock’s father, who was both a drunkard and spendthrift and who, in young Sherlock’s memory, had spent most of his time at Ash Heap Acres riding the plow horse to nearby Swinton to waste his nights (and many days) in Swaledale’s more sordid public houses, had lost ownership of the farm after spending the last of his brother Sherrinford’s money. Then in 1863, the father and his two extraordinary but unappreciated sons returned to London and a succession of ever-more-seedy rental homes and boarding houses. For Sherlock, it meant a return to their family life of always fleeing their creditors and his return to the streets.
But Mycroft, turning 16 that year, did not return to London with them. He went to Oxford instead.
Even while “in exile” at Ash Heap Acres in the Yorkshire Dales, their father had used Mycroft’s mathematical gifts to have his son pore through racing touts’ data sheets and pick future thoroughbred winners sold at Tattersall in London in Hyde Park, and then Holmes, Sr., after cabling cronies in the city, would place bets on those very horses at Alexandra Park’s “The Frying Pan” racecourse in the city. What Sherlock had noticed in those years (but their father hadn’t) was that Mycroft—seemingly as lazy and listless as he was overweight and brilliant—had been taking money from his father’s bets to place his own racing wagers, adding his secret picks through the agency of his father’s crony who lived in London and returning his smaller but ever-accruing winnings to a separate account. By 1863, 16-year-old Mycroft Holmes had set aside quite a bit of money. And he knew precisely how he was going to spend it.
Mycroft qualified to enter Oxford at the age of 16, paid his tuition and board with what he called his “Tattersall-Frying Pan Money”, and late one night, after waking his younger brother and uncharacteristically shaking hands with young Sherlock (Mycroft hated touching or being touched by other people), took himself off to Oxford. He brought with him only his cardboard suitcase containing a few clothes and a cheese sandwich Sherlock had made for him.
Over the next few years, disowned by his furious father, Mycroft sent Sherlock elaborately encrypted letters in which the older brother described how he reveled in everything that venerable institution had to offer, including the friendship of a certain mathematics professor at Christ Church named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, soon to be known to the world as Lewis Carroll. Mycroft and Dodgson soon became fast friends, sharing their excitement about mathematics (especially prime numbers), difficult codes, and odd patterns of numbers within such everyday things as railway schedules.
William Sherlock Holmes never met Dodgson; the younger son spent the later years of the 1860’s and early 1870’s fighting for his survival in the rough streets of London. In the late 1870’s, Mycroft Holmes plucked his younger brother out of the streets and paid to send him to Oxford. Sherlock refused to attend a school where his older brother had been such a well-known and admired figure. Mycroft then used the money to send his brother to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he hoped Sherlock would focus on Natural Sciences. Sherlock enjoyed some of his chemical-laboratory time at Cambridge but hated his instructors and fellow students and soon dropped out—twice.
To get a glimpse of the actual biography of the early years of Sherlock Holmes—a biography that will never be written—one might use as a template a biography of the younger years of James Joyce, with his drunken, often abusive father first renting fine homes in neighborhoods such as Kensington and then, fleeing landlords demanding rent, dragging his sons to ever-dirtier-and-more-cramped rental houses and then
to seedy rooms in boarding houses smelling of boiled cabbage. Sherlock had almost no formal education until his brief stint at Cambridge—had never attended a school, public or private, and had only intermittent tutors at home (when his father had “made a score” on the ponies or some other shady venture).
While Holmes’s father, during the brief periods he had a few coins and he and his son were not actively fleeing landlords in the night, had the habit of hiring a succession of fairly useless (and soon-to-throw-up-their-hands-in-surrender) tutors for young Sherlock, the senior Holmes did spend real money on excellent instructors in five areas of young Sherlock Holmes’s instruction: single-stick combat which Sherlock studied from the age of 7 onwards, boxing (including time spent sparring with several retired but still-famous English champion prizefighters), four years of having a Thai expert teach him the intricacies of Muay Boran martial arts, fencing (the most expensive instruction, the young Holmes sometimes taught by top French fencing experts even when the family could barely afford food), and shooting.
It was as if Sherlock’s father envisioned his strange, wild, but often withdrawn and brooding younger son becoming a soldier someday. Sherlock Holmes, of course, even at the age of 8 or 14, had no more interest in ever being a soldier than he had in being the first aeronaut to travel via balloon to the moon.
* * *
It had begun to rain. Holmes carried no umbrella, of course, since his down-at-the-heels-working-class-American disguise would not have included such a thing, so he simply pulled his soiled and ancient Irish cloth cap lower over his brow and kept slogging along as the paved streets finally gave out for good. Streets, as such, had all but disappeared in this part of the Southwest slums and been replaced by countless, hovel-lined alleys consisting of mud and deep ruts and the occasional board thrown down to more easily traverse some important short distance as from a tumbledown tin shack to a three-sided wooden privy.
His contacts in New York had told him that for what he sought he should seek out a former blacksmith shop on what was called Casey’s Alley, but of course there were no street signs here in the slums, no corner policeman from whom to ask directions (not that he would have given them to the unemployed-bounder likes of Holmes), and when Holmes asked directions of some raggedy children playing at torturing a rat, they responded by throwing horse apples at his head.
Before he found the abandoned blacksmith shop and the men he sought, Holmes came across the sort of abandoned commercial building he’d hoped to find amidst these shacks and empty factories. He stepped up onto the structure’s disintegrating wooden sidewalk, kicked open the warped front door, and looked inside.
It had been a cheap railroad-man’s hotel at one point in the past—the tracks, rusted over now, ran next to it in the high weeds—but now it was home to only pigeons and four-legged vermin. Not even the poorest families from the nearby slums sought shelter here. The reason was fascinating to Holmes—in the large sitting room just off what had once served as a small reception lobby, the ceiling had collapsed in a strange way that had created a rough circle almost ten feet across. It was a four-story building and what made that collapsed ceiling interesting to Holmes was that, peering carefully up through the aperture, he could see similar round cavities on what Americans counted as the second, third, and fourth stories. Staring upward, Holmes’s face grew wetter from a constant drizzle dropping through a gap in the old hotel’s rooftop some fifty feet above.
What could have weighed so much that it tore such a vertical path through a ceiling and three floors and a rooftop? Granting that the rain and rot had been far advanced when the event occurred, not even the heaviest of beds or metal safes or player pianos could carve out such destruction through a thick roof and three such reinforced layers of flooring.
There was no clue on the ground floor where Holmes stood save for a purplish-red discoloration that had ruined the splintered floorboards in a fifteen-foot-wide asterisk. It was as if twenty or so absurdly obese men had clustered tightly together on the fourth floor and fallen through three floors before splattering to their death here in the wide sitting room just off the lobby.
The man who had billed himself as the World’s First Consulting Detective—despite scores of private detectives also working in London at the time—did not put much faith in this primary hypothesis of the Case of the Falling Fat Men.
But the hotel would serve. The banister and railings were fallen away on much of the central staircase, but the stairs themselves might hold.
* * *
Two muddy blocks further on he found three walls and a canvas sheet, the remains of what had once been a blacksmith shop. Besides the old sign hanging slack from one hook, there was a rusted anvil lying in the alley mud. Clues enough for the World’s First and Foremost Consulting Detective. Holmes stepped up onto a wooden platform hardly less muddy than the alley below and moved the canvas aside with the knob of his lead-cored walking stick.
Smoking and sorting through what appeared to be piles of trash tossed onto a low table were three of the roughest-looking scoundrels Sherlock Holmes had ever encountered in the daylight. Two of them—they looked like idiot brothers—had arms so long and expressions (behind their red stubble) so primitive that they might have stepped out of a Stone Age Troglodyte diorama in the British Natural History Museum. The third man smelled so strongly of body odor that the stench seemed to shove Holmes physically back against the filthy canvas wall. The tall man had a sheath on the belt around his sagging, patched trousers and in that sheath was a Bowie knife the length of some Afghani and Zulu short swords Holmes had seen.
“What the fuck do you want?” said the taller man with the knife. He put a grimy hand on the heavy hilt.
“Someone told me that you could come up with the amount of morphine I need,” said Holmes in his best Philadelphia-American accent. Holmes had first seen the United States when he toured in the 1870’s with Percy Alexander’s acting troupe—nineteen cities in seven months—and he had taken care at the time to acquire as many regional dialects as he might need in the future.
“And heroin,” added Holmes. “I want heroin. If you don’t have the morphine, I’ll take the heroin.”
The tall man looked at Holmes’s worn work boots and patched clothing, smirked, and said, “Who’s to tell us you ain’t a bluecoat without the fuckin’ coat?”
“I’m not a copper,” said Holmes.
“Take your shirt off,” said the man with the knife. “Roll up your sleeve.”
Shaking slightly, Holmes removed his jacket, rough waistcoat, and workman’s wool shirt and rolled up his torn and dirty undershirt. All three of the men leaned forward to look at the constellation of scabs and scars on his inner arm.
“He slams regular on somethin’,” said the second Troglodyte, his hairy face hovering close to Holmes’s bare arm.
“Shut up, Finn,” said the tall man.
“Then who says you got the fucking money?” said the other Troglodyte.
“Shut up, Finn,” snapped the man with the Bowie knife. Evidently, since they were obviously brothers, calling both of the Troglodytes by the same name saved time.
Before the closer Finn backed away, Holmes caught a glimpse of a crudely tattooed-in-blue-ink st on his right wrist. This told Holmes that he was in the right place, at least according to his connections in Hell’s Kitchen in New York. He wanted to make contact with someone in the Washington gang known as the Southwest Toughs. It looked as though he had.
That tall man pointed at Holmes. “This ain’t Chinatown. Not even a hospital nearby to get supplies from. Mr. Bayer’s schmeck comes pure but it costs more hereabouts. You got what it takes to get it?”
“I have money,” whined Holmes in the desperate tones of an addict. He pulled out a thick wad of American bills.
“I guess you do, pal,” said the tall man with his fingers tapping idly on the hilt of the knife. “Finn, both of you, go get Mr. Culpepper and Mr. J. Now.”
Holmes saw a not-unfa
miliar light come into their eyes then, although the man with the knife at least tried to conceal his gleam. They were going to kill him for the cash.
CHAPTER 11
With the Finns gone, there were only the three of them in the canvas-walled blacksmith shop—Holmes, the tall man with the big knife, and the tall man’s body odor. Holmes stayed silent, the man with the knife stared at him without speaking, and the stench spoke for itself.
Less than ten minutes later, the Finns returned with two well-dressed men. One was tall, thin, and silent, with the slightest trace of thin mustache above perfectly formed lips. He had very dark hair and the kind of pale-to-translucent skin that meant even by this time in the early afternoon, he could have used a second shave of the day, although everything else about the man was impeccable. There was not the slightest hint of mud on his polished shoes or white spats. This tall, thin, silent man was dressed well enough that he could have joined Wall Street executives or—closer to home—Washington’s annual Easter Parade on K Street without looking out of place.
The other, shorter and heavier fellow, while expensively dressed, showed too many vulgar aspects not to stand out amongst real gentlemen. He sported a gold tooth that matched the gold-colored threads in his elaborate waistcoat. Visible above the waistcoat, most of it tucked into his impossibly clean trousers given the mud of Casey’s Alley, was the butt of a double-action pistol. A new, brown-felt homburg was perched above his greased-back black hair. He was smiling.
“Good God, Murtrick,” gasped the shorter, heavier newcomer with the pistol. “It’s powerful rank in here. It’s almost April . . . haven’t you taken your annual bath yet?” He waved the Finns out of the little shop and Holmes could hear the brothers’ boots squelching in the mud outside.
The tall thin man leaned back against a counter, only after dusting it with his handkerchief, and watched the proceedings in continued silence.