The Sherlockian (37 page)

“They are a marvel,” said Arthur. A twinge of hesitation remained in his throat.

“Quite,” said Bram. “And yet I hear it in your voice. Something bothers you about them.”

Arthur looked around and felt adrift in the nova glare of progress.

“I can’t explain it, precisely,” he said. “But they make me sad, somehow.”

“You feel it, too, then?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“It’s the end of an age,” said Bram. “And the beginning of a new one. The twentieth century. It sounds odd on the tongue, doesn’t it? The calendars have already changed. And now we’ve lost Oscar. Not even Victoria can last forever, though she’s certainly of a mind to try.”

“Hush! Don’t speak that way.”

“Oh, come now. Edward won’t be so bad. You wait and see.”

“Perhaps,” said Arthur, “what saddens me is not the passing of time but the curious sensation of being aware of it as it happens. We’re used to demarcating our histories in hindsight—we draw the lines afterward. It’s the scholars who separate one period from another. Did Constantine know that he was presiding over something more than the natural tumult of empire? Did Newton know that he’d arrived upon a wave of revolution, like Aphrodite on her clamshell? And moreover, did anyone
else
perceive the change in the air around them? Were they ‘self-aware,’ as we are?

“But you’re right, I think,” Arthur continued. “I don’t know how any man could feel his eyes burn in the electric light and not also feel the sudden palpability of history.”

Bram smiled. “The ‘palpability of history,’ ” he said, rolling it over his tongue. “I like that.” He paused, looking Arthur up and down curiously. “You’ve been writing again? At work on more stories?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, unsure of where Bram was headed with this line of inquiry.

“You always get a touch more poetic in conversation when you’ve just been writing. It’s something of which I’ve taken notice over the years. Quite charming, really.” Bram held his breath and scratched his beard. Arthur felt that Bram was preparing to broach a delicate subject. And when Bram next spoke, Arthur’s suspicions were confirmed.

“Holmes?”

“Oh, hell, not you, too!” said Arthur. “I get enough bullying about him from my publishers. No. I have not been writing about Sherlock Holmes.”

“As you say. I just had the thought . . .well, how shall I put this? There was no man who felt your ‘palpable history’ more than Sherlock Holmes.”

“I will not write more Holmes stories, do you understand? I would have thought I’d made that perfectly clear at this point.”

“I don’t care whether you do or not,” said Bram. “But you will, eventually. He’s yours, till death do you part. Did you really think he was dead and gone when you wrote ‘The Final Problem’? I don’t think you did. I think you always knew he’d be back. But whenever you take up your pen and continue, heed my advice. Don’t bring him here. Don’t bring Sherlock Holmes into the electric light. Leave him in the mysterious and romantic flicker of the gas lamp. He won’t stand next to this, do you see? The glare would melt him away. He was more the man of our time than Oscar was. Or than we were. Leave him where he belongs, in the last days of our bygone century. Because in a hundred years, no one will care about me. Or you. Or Oscar. We stopped caring about Oscar years ago, and we were his bloody
friends.
No, what they’ll remember are the stories. They’ll remember Holmes. And Watson. And Dorian Gray.”

“And your count? What was his name? From that little province . . .” Arthur trailed off. He searched his mind for the name of that backwater kingdom but couldn’t find it.

“Transylvania,” supplied Bram when it became clear that Arthur did not recall the name. “He was from Transylvania. No, they won’t remember him. He didn’t inspire the imagination of a people as did your Holmes. He was my great failure.” Bram laughed bitterly. “Count What’s-His-Name.”

“I’m sorry, Bram,” said Arthur. “I’m so very sorry. I know well how much of your own blood was in that novel. And I thought it was a grand thing, I truly did.” He paused. “Is that why Oscar’s death has you so battered up?”

“Yes, I suppose it is. We treated the man himself as scrap paper; to be used for a while and then discarded. But the stories we will treasure forever. At least Oscar will have his tales in posterity. What will I have?”

“ ‘The man is nothing. The work is everything.’ That’s what you’re getting at?”

“Yes.” Bram paused. “That’s Flaubert, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And we still remember.” Bram laughed bitterly again.

“My stories,” said Arthur. “The science of deduction. The reasoning detective. The solution delivered patly in a satisfying
dénouement.
They’re all horseshit.”

Bram smiled. “I know,” he said. “That’s why we need them.”

Arthur considered this. “I’ve moved on,” he offered after a long pause. “I’ve been working at realism. History.”

“Realism,” Bram repeated. “Realism, I think, is fleeting. It’s the romance that will live forever.”

“And what about me? Will my name live on?”

Bram’s face turned sour and grim. “I do not know, my friend. All I’ll say is this: The world does not need Arthur Conan Doyle. The world needs Sherlock Holmes.”

“No!” exclaimed Arthur quite suddenly. “No. I am better than he is, don’t you see? I will not be shamed by him. I will outlive him, and I will outshine him.”

“Arthur—”

“Wilde is dead and already forgotten, you say? We’re all bound for the grave and bitter obscurity? Damn it, no. I will not let Holmes win.”

“He doesn’t even
exist
!” pleaded Bram, but it was no use.

“And the killer of Emily Davison?” Arthur said. “He exists. And I’ll see him to his grave before I unearth that blasted Holmes from his. Holmes won’t save Emily Davison—I will.”

“Arthur,” said Bram quietly. “No one will save Emily Davison. She’s dead.”

Arthur paused, momentarily speechless, as he blinked under the electric lights.

C
HAPTER 38

The Pickerel

“Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

“The Yellow Face”

January 15, 2010

Harold sulked through the next three days, swimming through glass after glass of bourbon and damp Cambridge mist. He should leave, he knew. He should leave Cambridge, because there was nothing else for him there. But leaving Cambridge meant returning to London, it meant boarding a plane at Heathrow and flying west, past the murder scene in New York all the way to a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles.

The second he left Cambridge, real life would return, minute by minute, until he found himself on his own doorstep, standing on top of a dirty welcome mat that actually read “Welcome.” He would turn the key, lock himself inside, and none of this would ever have happened. The thought was more horrible than Harold could bear.

He should send Sebastian Conan Doyle a message—he knew that, too. As far as Harold was aware, he was still working for the man, and so he might as well let the guy know that the investigation he’d paid for was over. The diary had burned up a hundred years before, and now no one—not even Sebastian Conan Doyle—would be able to profit from it. Harold waited, however. Because if he gave Sebastian a call, if he sent him an e-mail, then he would be one step closer to facing the end of all of this.

But the end was there whether Harold admitted it or not. It couldn’t be held off even with liquor, or long and aimless walks through the university gardens. The end would not be held off by checking his messages, by wondering every few minutes whether Sarah might have called.

So he read through the letters again. Not because he thought there was anything pertinent left in them—he was more than sure that there wasn’t, and he was proved right the more of them he read. Harold read the letters because it was the only way not to leave. For now he could still sit in the same claustrophobic reading room, between the same moistureless walls where he’d been with Sarah. He thought about her standing up, getting her coat, saying something polite, and leaving.

Harold didn’t know where she had gone, or even where she had come from. He knew so little about her, really. And he would never learn more. Like the rest of this adventure, Sarah would be a secret he kept alone. A point of pride, in some small way, that he could never share with anyone.

The Pickerel, an old pub on Magdalene Street, became his home away from his hotel room. It was close and relatively free of shouting, flirting undergrads. It was dark, it kept its “football”-tuned televisions down, and it would do. For three nights it did. Harold kept to himself, and to some books he’d picked up from a shop down the street. They weren’t Holmes. They weren’t even mysteries. Harold wasn’t sure when he’d be able to read anything from the Canon again, but he thought it might be a while.

Strangely, the uncomfortable thought that he would never know the secret within the diaries bothered him less than the thought that his investigations were at an end. He wasn’t plagued by grief over the lack of answers—he was plagued by melancholy over how quickly the answers had come, and how final they appeared to be. Harold found himself pining not for solutions, but for questions. For
more.
He realized that even after all the stories he’d read, he’d been left completely unprepared for this moment—for the quiet days after the climax when the world ticked onward. He’d read thousands upon thousands of moments of revelation, of grand gestures of explanation in which the torn fabric of life had been stitched tightly shut and patted over. He’d read thousands of happy endings and thousands of sad ones, and he had found himself satisfied with both. What he had not read, he now realized, were the moments after the endings. If Harold believed in the stories because they presented an understandable world . . . well, what happens when the world is understood and that understanding means nothing to anyone but you and the empty tumbler of bourbon nestled in your palm? Harold had understood that not finding a solution would have been awful, but he had never before thought that finding one, and then having actually to go on living with it, might be worse.

One phrase kept flickering across his drunken sorrows. “The penny dreadful.” Having no one else to laugh to, Harold laughed to himself. It was a term so much more apt than he’d known. For the story he’d been living in had now been revealed to be fleeting, shallow, and cheap. A brief flash of petty magic that entertained only the dull and the naïve. A penny tale, and not even worth so much as that.

The taps on his shoulder came while he was reaching for more pretzels, his arm dangling across the long wooden bar in search of the tiny plastic bowl. They were an insistent series of quick taps—one-two-three on his back, just at the bottom of his shoulder blade. He turned, swiveling on the stool, and saw no one behind him. Strange.

Harold heard a cough and looked down. There he found some manner of black-helmeted gnome staring up at him. He swallowed, blinked, and recognized the face of Dr. Garber. With Harold high on his stool, the top of her head came up only just above his navel. She smiled.

“Harold!” she said, as if she were genuinely happy to see him.

“Hi there,” he replied. He really wasn’t in the mood for conversation right now. He turned himself a half inch farther back toward his drink, trying to be subtle.

“Where’s your friend? Sarah?” The subtlety didn’t seem to be working.

“Gone. She . . . she had to leave.” He was too tired to come up with a good lie. Plus, he was such a shitty liar anyway.

Dr. Garber frowned. She gave him a concerned look.

“Lovers’ quarrel?” she asked, in a tone equally playful and sympathetic.

“Not exactly.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll patch it up,” Dr. Garber said as she hopped up on the adjacent barstool. Harold was not aware of having invited her to join him. “I like the sight of you two together. You’re a lovely couple.”

He offered no response, save a few nods. He sipped more bourbon. Dr. Garber sipped at her own drink, something clear and carbonated, most likely gin and tonic. He realized that she wasn’t going to leave, and he determined that his best bet was to change the subject, so at least he didn’t have to talk about Sarah anymore.

“Thanks for your help with the letters,” he said. “I think we found everything we needed.”

“Terrific! You’re on your way to the missing Conan Doyle diary that Cale was on about?”

“Well . . . no.” It was going to involve more effort not to talk about this than to talk about it, Harold realized. Might as well just give in. “The diary was burned up. Stoker did it, in 1900. He tells Conan Doyle about it in one of his letters.”

“Hmmm,” Dr. Garber pondered. “Is that what he wanted to meet about, then?”

“Meet about?”

“Yes. The meeting Stoker kept trying to arrange. I’ve always wondered about it myself. Did you see the notes from Stoker’s business secretary at the Lyceum? Even she kept pressing Conan Doyle for the two to have a meeting, for a few months, on some pretense of financial concerns.”

Harold frowned. He hadn’t seen any correspondence between Stoker’s business secretary and Conan Doyle in the collection. “Are those letters down there as well?”

“Oh, I suppose not, now that you mention it. They weren’t from Stoker personally, you know, so they’re kept elsewhere. I forget which university they’ve run off to, but they’re in some lesser Stoker collection somewhere. Maybe Austin, actually. The messages are all from Stoker’s secretary to Conan Doyle’s secretary, so they’re really not of much interest. Mostly about Conan Doyle’s unpaid cut of profits from his plays, about making sure various seats of good quality are available for various of Conan Doyle’s friends. But if memory serves, all that fall and winter there’s some harping about scheduling a meeting between the two men.”

“A meeting?”

“Yes.”

In that moment Harold become intensely aware of all the bourbon in his system. He found himself, for the first time in days, fighting against it. The liquor had done its job of subverting and nullifying all rational thought for the past forty-eight hours, but now Harold desired very much to think. And to think clearly.