My Sherlock Holmes Page 20

  “I understand now,” intervened Le Villard. “The Count, wanting to get hold of the riches for himself, found no better way than to kill the entire population of Bog Town.”

  “Right, François,” replied Holmes, “with the help of Mr. Victor and … his daughter.”

  “Hey, hey!” exclaimed Gregson, “we had forgotten the girl!”

  Holmes nodded. “A grown-up by now, but a poor maiden out of her mind at times.”

  “You are speaking of the fair sleepwalker, aren’t you, Master?” said I.

  “Yes, my boy. An honest girl she was, but because of her intermittent lunacy, it became very simple for her wicked father to use her, against her will of course, at such simple tasks as lighting the fireworks or playing the barrel organ.”

  Sherlock Holmes took more puffs at his pipe and added:

  “Now, the ragmen’s loot was not enough for the Count. It had worked so nicely so far, why not, then, make hay and do the same on a larger, much larger scale. After having burnt down his mansion to annihilate every trace of the past, the rascal planned to spread plague over London to get hold of the multiple riches of the metropolis.”

  “Such as the Crown Jewels?” hazarded the inspector.

  “Yes, Gregson, and much more!”

  Holmes paused, then, as if addressing a fly on the ceiling: “Since we caught him,” he said, “the Count—or the Witch, as you like to call him—has been declared a very dangerous lunatic by the doctors. Justice won’t do anything against him, but he shall remain shut for the rest of his life in a padded cell at Bedlam. His daughter is cared upon by the best specialists and no doubt she will recover in the near future.”

  “But what about the ragmen’s riches, Mr. Holmes?” asked Gregson.

  “Lost!” was my master’s brief reply. But in saying this, he gave me a wink, and I answered with a slight, surreptitious smile. Le Villard, quick-witted as most Frenchmen, had no difficulty in understanding the trick, and he thought with an inward chuckle that the unclaimed loot might one day become the dowry of the Count’s unfortunate daughter. To divert the inspector’s possible suspicions, he stood up abruptly and said with a French accent, purposedly heavier than usual:

  “Bon sang! To get rid of Mr. Victor and all the ragmen at the same time is what you British may call, er … ‘killing two birds with one stone’!”

  Gregson fell into the trap. He could not help cracking a joke, retorting with a big laugh: “With one flea, rather! … With one flea, my friend!”

  PROFESSOR JAMES MORIARTY, PH.D., F.R.A.S.

  “The famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as—”

  “My blushes, Watson,” Holmes murmured, in a depreciating voice.

  “I was about to say ‘as he is unknown to the public.’”

  “A touch—a distinct touch!” cried Holmes. “You are developing a certain unexpected vein of pawky humor, Watson, against which I must learn to guard myself. But in calling Moriarty a criminal you are uttering libel in the eyes of the law, and there lies the glory and the wonder of it. The greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every devilry, the controlling brain of the underworld—a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of nations. That’s the man. But so aloof is he from criticism—so admirable in his management and self-effacement, that for those very words that you have uttered he could hale you to a court and emerge with your year’s pension as a lolatium for his wounded character. Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid—a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of mure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it? Is this a man to traduce?”

  —The Valley of Fear

  by MICHAEL KURLAND

  Years Ago and in a Different Place

  My name is Professor James Clovis Moriarty, Ph.D., F.R.A.S. You may have heard of me. I have been the author of a number of well-regarded scientific monographs and journal articles over the past few decades, including a treatise on the Binomial Theorem, and a monograph titled “The Dynamics of an Asteroid,” which was well received in scientific circles both in Great Britain and on the continent. My recent paper in the British Astronomical Journal, “Observations on the July 1889 Eclipse of Mercury with Some Speculations Concerning the Effect of Gravity on Light Waves,” has occasioned some comment among those few who could understand its implications.

  But I fear that if you know my name, it is, in all probability, not through any of my published scientific papers. Further, my current, shall I say, notoriety, was not of my own doing and most assuredly not by my choice. I am by nature a retiring, some would have it secretive, person.

  Over the past few years narratives from the memoirs of a certain Dr. John Watson concerning that jackanapes who calls himself a “consulting detective,” Mr. Sherlock Holmes, have been appearing in the Strand magazine and elsewhere with increasing frequency, and have attained a, to my mind, most unwarranted popularity. Students of the “higher criticism,” as those insufferable pedants who devote their lives to picking over minuscule details of Dr. Watson’s stories call their ridiculous avocation, have analyzed Watson’s rather pedestrian prose with the avid attention gourmands pay to mounds of goose-liver pate. They extract hidden meanings from every word, and extrapolate facts not in evidence from every paragraph. Which leads them unfailingly to conclusions even more specious than those in which Holmes himself indulges.

  Entirely too much of this misdirected musing concerns me and my relationship with the self-anointed master detective. Amateur detection enthusiasts have wasted much time and energy in speculation as to how Sherlock Holmes and I first met, and just what caused the usually unflappable Holmes to describe me as “the Napoleon of crime” without supplying the slightest evidence to support this blatant canard.

  I propose to tell that story now, both to satisfy this misplaced curiosity and to put an end to the various speculations which have appeared in certain privately circulated monographs. To set the record straight: Holmes and I are not related; I have not had improper relations with any of his female relatives; I did not steal his childhood inamorata away from him. Neither did he, to the best of my knowledge, perform any of these services for me or anyone in my family.

  In any case, I assure you that I will no longer take such accusations lightly. Privately distributed though these monographs may be, their authors will have to answer for them in a court of law if this continues.

  Shortly before that ridiculous episode at the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes had the temerity to describe me to his befuddled amanuensis as “organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in this great city.” (By which he meant London, of course.) What crimes I had supposedly committed he was curiously silent about. Watson did not ask for specifics, and none were offered. The good doctor took Holmes’s unsupported word for this unsupportable insult. Had Holmes not chosen to disappear for three years after his foul accusation, I most assuredly would have had him in the dock for slander.

  And then, when Holmes returned from his extended vacation, during which time he did not have the kindness, the decency, to pass on one word that would let his dear companion know that he was not dead, he gave an account of our “struggle” at the falls that any child of nine would have recognized as a complete work of fiction—but it fooled Watson.

  The truth about the Reichenbach incident—but no, that is not for this narrative. Just permit me a brief pause, the merest aside in this chronicle before I go on, so that I may draw your attention to some of the details of that story that should have alerted the merest tyro to the fact that he was being diddled—but that Watson swallowed whole.

  In the narrative that he published under the name “The Final Problem,” Watson relates that Holmes appeared in his consulting room one day in April of 1891 and told him that he was being threatened by Professor Moriarty—myself—and that he had already been attacked twice that day by my agents and expected to be attacked again, probably by a
man using an air rifle. If that were so, was it not thoughtful of him to go to the residence of his close friend and thus place him, also, in deadly peril?

  At that meeting Holmes declares that in three days he will be able to place “the Professor, with all the principal members of his gang,” in the hands of the police. Why wait? Holmes gives no coherent reason. But until then, Holmes avers, he is in grave danger. Well now! If this were so, would not Scotland Yard gladly have given Holmes a room, nay a suite of rooms, in the hotel of his choosing—or in the Yard itself—to keep him safe for the next three days? But Holmes says that nothing will do but that he must flee the country, and once again Watson believes him. Is not unquestioning friendship a wonderful thing?

  Holmes then arranges for Watson to join him in this supposedly hasty flight. They meet at Victoria Station the next morning, where Watson has trouble recognizing Holmes, who has disguised himself as a “venerable Italian priest,” presumably to fool pursuers. This assumes that Holmes’s enemies can recognize the great detective, but have no idea what his good friend Dr. Watson, who wears no disguise, who indeed is congenitally incapable of disguise, looks like.

  Again note that after a six-month absence, during which Holmes and I—but no, it is not my secret to tell—at any rate, six months after I was assumed to be dead I returned to my home on Russell Square and went about my business as usual, and Watson affected not to notice. After all, Holmes had killed me, and that was good enough for Watson.

  I could go on. Indeed, it is with remarkable restraint that I do not. To describe me as a master criminal is actionable; and then to compound matters by making me out to be such a bungler as to be fooled by Holmes’s juvenile antics is quite intolerable. It should be clear to all that the events leading up to that day at Reichenbach Falls, if they occurred as described, were designed by Holmes to fool his amiable companion, and not “the Napoleon of crime.”

  But I have digressed enough. In this brief paper I will describe how the relationship between Holmes and myself came to be, and perhaps supply some insight into how and why Holmes developed an entirely unwarranted antagonism toward me that has lasted these many years.

  I first met Sherlock Holmes in the early 1870s—I shall be no more precise than that. At the time I was a senior lecturer in mathematics at, I shall call it, “Queens College,” one of the six venerable colleges making up a small inland university which I shall call “Wexleigh” to preserve the anonymity of the events I am about to describe. I shall also alter the names of the persons who figure in this episode, save only those of Holmes and myself, as those who were involved surely have no desire to be reminded of the episode or pestered by the press for more details. You may, of course, apply to Holmes for the true names of these people, although I imagine that he will be no more forthcoming than I.

  Let me also point out that memories are not entirely reliable recorders of events. Over time they convolute, they conflate, they manufacture, and they discard, until what remains may bear only a passing resemblance to the original event. So if you happen to be one of the people whose lives crossed those of Holmes and myself at “Queens” at this time, and your memory of some of the details of these events differs from mine, I assure you that in all probability we are both wrong.

  Wexleigh University was of respectable antiquity, with respectable ecclesiastical underpinnings. Most of the dons at Queens were churchmen of one description or another. Latin and Greek were still considered the foundations upon which an education should be constructed. The “modern” side of the university had come into existence a mere decade before, and the Classics dons still looked with mixed amazement and scorn at the Science instructors and the courses offered, which they insisted on describing as “Stinks and Bangs.”

  Holmes was an underclassman at the time. His presence had provoked a certain amount of interest among the faculty, many of whom remembered his brother Mycroft, who had attended the university some six years previously. Mycroft had spent most of his three years at Queens in his room, coming out only for meals and to gather armsful of books from the library and retreat back to his room. When he did appear in the lecture hall it would often be to correct the instructor on some error of fact or pedagogy that had lain unnoticed, sometimes for years, in one of his lectures. Mycroft had departed the university without completing the requirements for a degree, stating with some justification that he had received all the institution had to offer, and he saw no point in remaining.

  Holmes had few friends among his fellow underclassmen and seemed to prefer it that way. His interests were varied but transient, as he dipped first into one field of study and then another, trying to find something that stimulated him sufficiently for him to make it his life’s work; something to which he could apply his powerful intellect and his capacity for close and accurate observation, which was even then apparent, if not fully developed.

  An odd sort of amity soon grew between myself and this intense young man. On looking back I would describe it as a cerebral bond, based mostly on the shared snobbery of the highly intelligent against those whom they deem as their intellectual inferiors. I confess to that weakness in my youth, and my only defense against a charge of hubris is that those whom we went out of our way to ignore were just as anxious to avoid us.

  The incident I am about to relate occurred in the fall, shortly after Holmes returned to begin his second year. A new don joined the college, occupying the newly created chair of Moral Philosophy, a chair which had been endowed by a midlands mill owner who made it a practice to employ as many children under twelve in his mills as his agents could sweep up off the streets. Thus, I suppose, his interest in Moral Philosophy.

  The new man’s name was—well, for the purposes of this tale let us call him Professor Charles Maples. He was, I would judge, in his mid-forties; a stout, sharp-nosed, myopic, amiable man who strutted and bobbed slightly when he walked. His voice was high and intense, and his mannerisms were complex. His speech was accompanied by elaborate hand motions, as though he would mold the air into a semblance of what he was describing. When one saw him crossing the quad in the distance, with his gray master of arts gown flapping about him, waving the mahogany walking stick with the brass duck’s-head handle that he was never without, and gesticulating to the empty air, he resembled nothing so much as a corpulent king pigeon.

  Moral Philosophy was a fit subject for Maples. No one could say exactly what it encompassed, and so he was free to speak on whatever caught his interest at the moment. And his interests seemed to be of the moment: he took intellectual nourishment from whatever flower of knowledge seemed brightest to him in the morning, and had tired of it ere night drew nigh. Excuse the vaguely poetic turn of phrase; speaking of Maples seems to bring that out in one.

  I do not mean to suggest the Maples was intellectually inferior; far from it. He had a piercing intellect, an incisive clarity of expression, and a sarcastic wit that occasionally broke through his mild façade. Maples spoke on the Greek and Roman concept of manliness, and made one regret that we lived in these decadent times. He lectured on the nineteenth-century pen chant for substituting a surface prudery for morality, and left his students with a vivid image of unnamed immorality seething and billowing not very far beneath the surface. He spoke on this and that and created in his students with an abiding enthusiasm for this, and an unremitting loathing for that.

  There was still an unspoken presumption about the college that celibacy was the proper model for the students, and so only the unmarried, and presumably celibate, dons were lodged in one or another of the various buildings within the college walls. Those few with wives found housing around town where they could, preferably a respectable distance from the university. Maples was numbered among the domestic ones, and he and his wife, Andrea, had taken a house with fairly extensive grounds on Barleymore Road not far from the college, which they shared with Andrea’s sister, Lucinda Moys, and a physical education instructor named Crisboy, who, choosing to live away from the
college for reasons of his own, rented a pair of rooms on the top floor. There was a small guest house at the far end of the property which was untenanted. The owner of the property, who had moved to Glasgow some years previously, kept it for his own use on his occasional visits to town. The Mapleses employed a cook and a maid, both of whom were day help, sleeping in their own homes at night.

  Andrea was a fine-looking woman who appeared to be fearlessly approaching thirty, with intelligent brown eyes set in a broad face and a head of thick, brown hair, which fell down her back to somewhere below her waist when she didn’t have it tied up in a sort of oversized bun circling her head. She was of a solid appearance and decisive character.

  Her sister, “Lucy” to all who knew her, was somewhat younger and more ethereal in nature. She was a slim, golden haired creature of mercurial moods: usually bright and confident and more than capable of handling anything the mean old world could throw at her, but on occasion dark and sullen and angry at the rest of the world for not measuring up to her standards. When one of her moods overtook her, she retired to her room and refused to see anyone until it passed, which for some reason the young men of the college found intensely romantic. She had a manner of gazing at you while you conversed, as though your words were the only things of importance in the world at that instant, and she felt privileged to be listening. This caused several of the underclassmen to fall instantly in love with her, as she was perhaps the first person, certainly the first woman aside from their mothers, who had ever paid serious attention to anything they said.

  One of the underclassmen who was attracted by Miss Lucy’s obvious charms was Mr. Sherlock Holmes. She gazed at him wide-eyed while he spoke earnestly, as young men speak, of things that I’m sure must have interested her not in the least. Was it perhaps Holmes himself who interested the pert young lady? I certainly hoped so, for his sake. Holmes had no sisters, and a man who grows up without sisters has few defenses against those wiles, those innocent wiles of body, speech, and motion, with which nature has provided young females in its blind desire to propagate the species.