“I beg your pardon?” Holmes batted the ashes from the old pipe into a crystalline ashtray on a side table.
“I think you should not put the household through this farce,” said James. “John Hay may be busy in his study until tea time. I propose that you pack your bags and leave while you can.”
“And why would I do that?” Holmes asked softly. “Henry Adams won’t even be back until sometime next week. I’ve hardly begun the investigation into his wife’s death.”
“That’s all humbug,” snapped James. “Clover Adams suffered from a melancholic disposition. She fell to a low after her father’s death and never recovered. Melancholy ran in her family, as her brother Ned’s suicide attests. Turning it into a mystery is humbug.”
Holmes looked as if he were interested in what the writer was saying. “Then what about the annual ‘She was murdered’ notes sent to . . .”
“More humbug,” Henry James said firmly. “I shall not allow you to re-open old griefs in such a way. I have no idea why I’ve gone along with your insanities this long. But no matter. It must end. Today. You pack and leave and I shall think of something to tell the Hays and Clarence King and the others. I myself shall leave early tomorrow.”
“So you no longer think me capable of solving this mystery?” asked Holmes, repacking and relighting his pipe.
“I no longer think that you are Sherlock Holmes.” There, thought James. I’ve said it.
The other man looked up from his pipe with obvious surprise and an even greater expression of interest. “James, it was you who identified me from memory—despite my Sigerson disguise—near le Pont Neuf.”
“I was mistaken. Or perhaps I had met you at Mrs. O’Connor’s garden party four years ago, but you were in disguise then as well.”
“In disguise as . . .”
“As Sherlock Holmes. A fictional character.”
“Oh hoh!” cried the man whom James had known as Holmes. “So now you agree with me that Sherlock Holmes does not really exist! What changed your mind, James?”
“This.” The writer held out the tan edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
“May I?” asked the man with the pipe. He took the book gently in his long, strong fingers and began to flip through it. “I was vaguely aware that the American edition of Watson’s collected Strand stories was coming out this year, but I had no idea it would be published here so early.”
“Last month,” said James and wished that he hadn’t spoken.
“The illustrations by Sidney Paget are rather good, aren’t they?” asked the other man. His tone held mild amusement.
“If they purport to be of you,” said James, “they flatter you.”
“Oh, absolutely!” cried Holmes. He removed the pipe from between his teeth as he laughed. “But, you see, I’ve never met Mr. Sidney Paget. Nor have I allowed a photograph to be taken of me. Paget uses his brother as a model for his ‘Sherlock Holmes’—or so I am told. His brother is an even more well-known illustrator and Watson informed me that the Strand people had meant to hire him rather than his brother Sidney, but the letter went to the wrong Paget.”
James stared blankly at Holmes—at the man whom he still thought of as Holmes—until finally he could stand the silence no longer. The smoke from the shag tobacco made him cough before he could get a sentence out. “I now believe, sir, that you are some person . . . some deranged person . . . pretending to be the fictional character Sherlock Holmes who, in turn, is pretending to be a fictional explorer named Jan Sigerson.”
“Oh, I say!” cried Holmes, removing his pipe again and smiling most broadly. “Very good, James. Very good indeed. That hypothesis makes much more sense than my own . . . that is, that I simply don’t exist outside these little”—he held up the book—“fictions.”
“So you admit it,” said Henry James. He felt a strange and not very pleasant but quite persistent invisible weight press against his chest.
“Admit that I am deranged? I can hardly defend myself against that accusation. Admit that I am someone other than the possibly—quite probably—fictional character Sherlock Holmes? Alas, I cannot confess to that, sir. I am either the real Sherlock Holmes or the fictional simulacrum of same. Those are my sad choices at the moment.”
James felt something like panic pluck at him. The other man was deranged. And he might well be dangerous—a physical threat to James even at this moment.
“Oh, I think not dangerous,” said Holmes, puffing away again. “Not to you, at least, Mr. James.”
It was as if he’d plucked the author’s thoughts out of the air.
“What did you think of Watson’s . . . stories?” asked Holmes, closing the book and setting it on the table next to James.
“They’re absurd.”
Holmes laughed again. “Yes, they are, aren’t they? Poor Watson works so hard to bring the rough notes of his chronicles up to Conan Doyle’s literary standards, but I doubt if either man understands how the reality of my cases could ever really be translated into any work of art. You see, James, the better cases already are works of art—without the melodrama and fictional trappings.”
“So you admit that these stories are inferior literary efforts,” managed James. “Mere overwrought . . . romances.”
Holmes winced at the last word but sounded amiable enough as he said, “Absolutely, my dear chap.” He opened the book again. “I see that Watson included the tale he called ‘The Copper Beeches’. Shall we just take that as an example of literary failure?”
“I already have taken it as such,” said James.
“As well you should,” said Holmes, prodding the stem of his pipe in James’s direction. “I ask you . . . does it make any sense whatsoever that this . . .” He had to fan through pages and glance down at the story. “That this Violet Hunter person should come to our apartment and take up our time, Watson’s and mine, asking advice on whether she take some dreary governess position in the country? No matter how odd her employer’s requirements might have been, I mean. And does it make sense that I would waste my time listening to such a plea for advice . . . unnecessary advice, since you may have noticed that the baggage had already made up her mind about taking the position.”
“Total nonsense,” said James. He felt a sense of oddness verging on vertigo that he was agreeing with Holmes. Or vice versa.
“This ‘Violet Hunter’—that wasn’t the wench’s real name, of course—was not my client.”
“No?” James would have called back the syllable if he’d been able to.
“No. Our client—the person in need of help who showed up on this cold day in early March of eighteen eighty-six—was the ‘Mr. Fowler’ to whom Watson refers, but who is never directly introduced to the reader.”
“Mr. Fowler?” repeated James, despite himself. “The imprisoned Alice Rucastle’s fiancé? The man in the mirror? The one whom Dr. Watson informs us ends up marrying the liberated Miss Rucastle and moves with her to Mauritius?”
Holmes grinned around the pipe in a way that looked almost evil. “Precisely,” he said. “Although ‘Mr. Fowler’—I shall call him Peter since that was the gentleman’s real first name—did not, as it turned out, marry the liberated and enriched Miss Alice Rucastle and . . . how did Watson put it?” He flipped pages. “Oh, yes . . . become ‘the holder of a Government appointment in the Island of Mauritius.’ ”
“Is any of this relevant or of any importance whatsoever to your fraudulent representation of yourself as Sherlock Holmes?” asked James.
“Only if you wish to understand the wide gap between this . . . fictional . . . Sherlock Holmes’s life and his reported adventures,” said Holmes.
“I see no purpose to discussing either,” said Henry James.
Holmes nodded in agreement but removed the pipe and began speaking in slow, low tones.
“Peter . . . Fowler . . . came to see Dr. Watson and me in March of eighteen eighty-eight. His problem was a domestic one, yes, but one which I thou
ght at the time might serve my need to some true detection. In the end, you see, James, ‘Mr. Fowler’—who was a very nice London gentleman, by the by—did not marry Miss Alice Rucastle and live happily ever after. The truth of the matter . . . the sort of truth that Watson so frequently works so hard to avoid . . . was that his former fiancée, Alice Rucastle, tore Fowler’s throat out with her teeth. She murdered him.”
“Good God,” breathed James.
“Mr. Fowler came to me because he’d been happily engaged to Alice Rucastle . . . Watson’s clumsy choice of a name, of course . . . until what Fowler had referred to as his fiancée’s ‘pleasant if frequent flightiness’ had turned into a severe brain fever . . . whatever ‘brain fever’ might actually be. Watson, like most medicos in our benighted era, swears by ‘brain fever’, but not one doctor in a thousand can describe its cause or cure.”
“But Miss Rucastle . . . whatever her real name might be . . . did have it?” asked James. His weakness for hearing bizarre stories was almost the equal of his penchant for writing them.
“She had it . . . but her infant younger brother, Edward, was the one who died from it,” said Holmes.
“Edward,” repeated James. He remembered the moths circling the lamp late the night before as he approached sleep and the end of the collection of tales. “The little boy with evil behavior and the oversized head. The object of Miss Violet Hunter’s efforts of instruction as a governess.”
Holmes laughed again. “Miss Violet Hunter was not hired as a governess. Baby Edward had been murdered by the time Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle hired her . . . and they hired her only to impersonate their imprisoned daughter Alice.”
“Wait,” said Henry James, holding up one well-manicured hand. “You’re saying that Violet Hunter, by any other name, knew from the start that she had no duty except to impersonate the imprisoned daughter of the Rucastles? Mr. Fowler’s fiancée?”
“That’s precisely what I am saying, James.” Holmes stared out the window at leaf-shadows on St. John’s across the street. “ ‘Violet Hunter’ was nothing more than a woman of the streets . . . in company, she could not have impersonated even so lowly a lady as a governess. Mr. ‘Jephro Rucastle’—who, by the by, was no villain as Watson re-created it but who also was soon to die violently—made it clear to the London wench from the first that she would be paid thirty pounds a month—not a quarter as Watson’s re-telling has it—thirty pounds a month just to cut her hair as Alice’s had been cut during her terrible illness, to wear Alice’s blue dress, to sit in the window where Peter Fowler could, from behind her and from a distance, see her laughing and evidently recovered from her madness.”
“Her madness?” gasped James.
“Oh, yes. I forgot to put that little fact in sequence, didn’t I? This is why Watson says that I must never write up my own adventures. When Alice’s father—Alice was her real Christian name, by the way—when her father realized that she would never regain her sanity, he wrote to Peter Fowler in a poor imitation of his daughter’s hand to break off their engagement. But Fowler never believed that the letter was from Alice.”
“Alice Rucastle was mad?”
“As a hatter,” said Holmes with absolutely no tone of sympathy in his voice. “It had manifested itself in sly and then secret but serious ways for years, but during the winter of her engagement to Peter Fowler—a marriage which her parents did not know of and would never have allowed since the insanity was hereditary—the worsening illness led first to the fits, then to the seizures, and finally to the violent behavior that the Rucastles reported to Fowler and the world as ‘brain fever’.”
“But surely Mr. Fowler would have understood,” said James. He tried to imagine writing this tale himself, but failed. It was too sensationalist. Too much the fever-dream territory of a contemporary Wilkie Collins.
“Understood that in her violent madness Alice Rucastle had murdered and partially eaten her two-year-old younger brother Edward?” Holmes asked blandly. “I rather doubt it.”
“Good Lord,” gasped James. “But you knew of this . . . abomination?”
“From the beginning,” said Holmes, no longer smiling. “Far from being a villain seeking an inheritance or whatever twaddle Watson added to distort the tale, the so-called Jephro Rucastle—his real name Jethrow Dawkins—was such an indulgent and loving father that he could not abide the thought of his daughter Alice—the murderer of his only son, the heir of the family name and title—being locked away in a bedlam. Thus the locked wing, the barred door.”
“But if Miss Violet Hunter did not discover these things . . . if she already knew about Alice’s madness, the reason for the locked wing and room . . .”
“It was Peter Fowler, not the harlot Violet Hunter, who insisted on luring the Rucastles into town that March night in eighteen eighty-six,” Holmes said grimly. “He sent us a telegram stating his intentions of ‘saving’ his beloved Alice. I sent him an immediate telegram in return, ordering him not to go anywhere near Hodgkyss Hall—he never received the telegram since he had already left his hotel in Wells—and Watson and I rushed out to Wookey Hole as fast as we could . . .”
“Wookey Hole?” chimed James.
“Yes, of course. Close by the famous caves near Wells in Somerset. ‘Fowler’ was staying in the Wookey Hole Hotel in Wells. Watson’s fictionalized ‘Rucastles’ were actually the well-known Dawkins family. Alice’s father was Jethrow Dawkins, Lord Hodgkyss of Hodgkyss Hall, first cousin to the Vicar of Wookey and so-called ‘Hero of the Transvaal’ in the eighteen eighty-one Boer Rebellion.”
“Even I, a mere American, have heard of the Witch of Wookey Hole,” said James. His voice sounded strange to his own ears. He could not quite believe what he had just said. Henry James, Jr.—like his father Henry James, Sr., and his older brother William—had always had a weakness for ghost stories.
“The Witch of Wookey Hole is a limestone stalagmite that’s been scaring tourists since the sixteen hundreds,” Holmes said in the flattest of tones. “Alice Dawkins was the real-life Monster of Wookey Hole. And only seven years ago.”
Henry James squinted at Holmes. “You said that Peter Fowler was murdered. It was written that Mr. Rucastle—and this Dawkins, Lord Hodgkyss, ‘died violently’. There’s a lot of yet-unexplained mayhem there.”
“We arrived only minutes too late, Watson and I,” Holmes said in a barely audible voice. “Fowler had brought a tall ladder, risked the dangerous traverse across ancient slate tiles in the darkness, and let himself down through the small skylight in Alice’s locked room. She must have sat on the bed in silence and let him unlock her manacles, padlocks, and chains while he whispered endearments. Then she used her teeth and uncut nails to slash his throat. She was eating his heart when Dawkins, her father, rushed in. The ‘Violet Hunter’ hired harlot was close on Dawkins’s heels, and, by pure coincidence, wearing Alice’s blue dress that evening.”
James sat, staring and waiting. Despite the fact that all this had to be pure invention, he found that he had trouble breathing.
“Mr. Dawkins, Lord Hodgkyss, had brought a pistol with him,” continued Holmes in the same flat tones. “He had told me in an interview the week before that he was sure he could never use it on his daughter, no matter what new unspeakable actions she might undertake. He was correct. As Watson and I ran down the dusty hallway and shouted at him, Dawkins raised the pistol to his temple and blew his own brains out.”
“And Miss Violet Hunter?” asked James. “The non-governess governess?”
“Mad,” said Sherlock Holmes. “She began screaming at the sight of what was transpiring in Alice Dawkins’s room and continues to scream to this day, although her asylum care is paid for by Lady Hodgkyss.”
James smiled to show that he was not a total rube. “Rube”—the word came from when a traveling circus had come to the outskirts of Newport when he was young. James hadn’t thought of that word for years; he’d never used it in a story.
“And what about Car
lo?” he asked softly.
“Carlo?” said Holmes.
“In ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’, Watson writes about Carlo, the giant baying mastiff that prowled the yard at night and that tore out Mr. Rucastle’s throat in the end.”
Holmes smiled thinly. “ ‘Baying mastiff’. Watson never has been able to tell his Hound Group from his Herding Dogs . . . Watson just doesn’t know dogs. There was a mastiff at Hodgkyss Hall. His name was Barney, he was fifteen years old, and if he’d encountered a burglar in the night, Barney would have rolled over to have his belly rubbed. The only infamy Barney ever committed, according to Jethrow Dawkins when Watson and I spoke to him three days before he died, was when he playfully chewed up one of Lady Hodgkyss’s stuffed animals.”
“But Watson wrote in ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’ that he had to take his service revolver and—I quote—blow the creature’s brains out after it had killed Mr. Rucastle,” said James in a strained voice.
“It was Mr. Dawkins’s revolver, and I used it,” said Holmes. “Alice Dawkins was preoccupied with devouring her father when I took the fallen revolver and blew her brains out.”
The two men sat in silence for several minutes.
Finally Sherlock Holmes—or the man pretending to be the imaginary Sherlock Holmes—said, “I believe I understand why Watson felt he had to write about the Wookey Hole Affair . . . the so-called ‘Adventure of the Copper Beeches’. It haunted him. Bothered his sleep. It’s in Dr. Watson’s nature to try to rearrange things into simpler stories of right and wrong. But if I were he, I would have left the entire Wookey Hole business alone.”
Henry James looked the other man in the eye and said, “You realize, of course, that everything that you’ve told me here sounds absolutely insane.”
“Absolutely,” said Holmes. The detective checked his watch. “John Hay said that a light lunch would be set out in the conservatory dining area at noon and for us to go ahead even if he were still busy. Would you care to join me, Mr. James?”