Associates of Sherlock Holmes Page 18

  By the time I could pull myself to an upright position, most of the audience had left and the suspended spotlight and seat arrangement was empty. I clutched at my chest, and found a large hole in my starched shirt, a great deal of shredded leather and silk, and a still-hot bullet, but no blood.

  I looked around, and found Holmes sitting a few rows behind me.

  “I take it that everything has concluded satisfactorily?” I asked.

  “The blackmailer is in custody,” he said, “and, thanks to your actions, the Right Honourable Quentin Furnell is alive and well.” He stared at me, and there was a curious expression on his face. “I sometimes need reminding,” he said, “that events do not always follow their predicted course. Random incidents, such as the inopportune and unintended tightening of a finger upon a trigger, can sometimes lead to unanticipated but tragic outcomes that logic can neither foresee nor prevent. I have learned something today, and for that – and your invaluable help – I thank you.”

  I thought about some of the things I had seen as I had looked around the audience earlier – several well-known people together in boxes who should not have been seen together at all, and people with their wives or husbands beside them who had nevertheless been casting loving glances at others nearby. I had made copious notes – mentally, of course – and I could already anticipate a series of columns appearing in the newspapers in the near future.

  “Glad to help, Mr Holmes,” I said. “Glad to help.”

  THE PRESBURY PAPERS

  Jonathan Barnes

  I’ve always been fascinated by Professor Presbury – that murky figure at the heart of Doyle’s late addition to the canon, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” (1923). It’s an often-overlooked case for Sherlock Holmes, as notable as much for what is not stated as for that which is set out plainly by the author. Writing in The Times Literary Supplement in 2010, I suggested that the piece is “a sour parable about the endurance of lust” and that, upon finishing the tale, “the feeling persists that there is something in the narrative – hidden, submerged – which the reader is not permitted to comprehend but which forms the source of its power”.

  What a terrific opportunity it was, when I was asked last year to contribute a story to the current volume, to go back into that adventure and to tease out some of its subtext, to dive down towards that which is submerged and bring it up into the light. I’ve often wondered what became of the Professor and have speculated as to where his dark desires might have led him. Holmes, after all, once said of his opponent that, “when one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it”. I couldn’t help but ask if, having experienced animal passion, the old man could really have walked away from it. Any time spent in seclusion and disgrace, I reasoned, would surely be only temporary. My story imagines the end of such an exile – as well as its final, tragic consequences.

  —Jonathan Barnes

  From Callitrix, the journal of Sapperson College, Cambridge, Michaelmas Term, 1904

  VALE PRESBURY

  The college bade a reluctant if heartfelt farewell this term to one of its noblest and most accomplished sons. Professor C.R.H. Presbury, whose fame as an authority in the field of physiology burst long ago the banks of academe to become a national byword for intellectual rigour and clinical expertise, has chosen retirement following a recent, regrettable period of ill health.

  His departure was marked by a brief ceremony, which was attended in considerable number by students and fellows and by sundry others whose lives have been enriched through interchanges of various kinds with the professor.

  Presbury himself, a notably frailer figure than he who once bestrode the lecture hall, gave a warm speech in which he thanked the college authorities for their exemplary treatment of him in what he called “trying circumstances”. He also regretted deeply the absence of his daughter and her husband (who were, he said, now resident in the Americas) and declared his intention to leave the university town in favour of a small fenland village where he meant to live out his widower days in “contemplation of the highest of life’s callings”. It needs hardly to be said that he shall be missed greatly by all who knew him.

  From An Almanac of the Towns, Villages and Hamlets of the East of England (1908 edition)

  The overwhelming impression which is acquired during a visit to the village of SEATON LEIGH is one of stark inhospitality. Although not without elements of the quaint and picturesque – its inn, The Upright Badger being, for example, unexpectedly well-stocked and well-appointed – the place boasts a largely taciturn community and a flat fenland landscape. Lone and level fields extend in every direction, studded occasionally by severe dark hedgerows and glowering patches of woodland. There is little to divert that curious traveller who comes in search of the aesthetically pleasing (far better for our wayfarer to journey instead to the nearby homesteads of Baker’s Drive or Graverton) and nothing at all to suggest why, if one were not born to this cold agrarian realm, one should ever choose to make a life for oneself here.

  Nonetheless, and against all odds, the village boasts a celebrated resident. Professor C.R.H. Presbury, the once-noted university physiologist, dwells in what was formerly a coaching inn, leading, it is said, an intensely private retirement and taking no part in the business of Seaton Leigh.

  I do believe, however, that, during my visitation, I glimpsed him: a tall, defiant figure, stalking into the woods to take his evening constitutional, moving with determined but unfathomable purpose, like some weirdly animate scarecrow.

  An extract from the private correspondence between Mr E.S. Foote, proprietor of the Epicurean Bookshop, and Professor C.R.H. Presbury (ret’d)

  24th October 1911

  Dear Professor,

  It is my honour and privilege to enclose within this parcel those curious and singular books that you requested in your last communication, namely:

  (i) The Secret Life of a Ballerina

  (ii) A Schoolgirl’s Education

  (iii) Confessions of a Flagellant

  (iv) Further Memoirs of a Courtesan

  (v) A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus

  I trust that these volumes shall educate and enchant in equal measure. Should you require further additions to your library, pray do not hesitate to renew our correspondence. Until that time, I would remind you respectfully of the ceaseless necessity of discretion and tact.

  I remain, sir, your most humble servant,

  E S Foote

  Telegram

  Sent: 3rd January 1913

  From: Scheherazade

  To: Panjandrum

  Subject located. Extraction begun. Expect further word soon.

  From the private journal of Professor C.R.H. Presbury

  4th January 1913

  More than a decade has passed since last I set pen to paper in this fashion. That was at a time before the delightful – if ultimately faithless – Miss Morphy came first within my purview, before the gentleman from Prague provided the chief instrument of my downfall, before the advent in my rich existence of that professional busybody Mr Sherlock Holmes and before the ignominious end of a career which cannot be characterised as having been anything other than amongst the very first rank. My life since those unhappy days, which saw the cessation of my engagement and the severing of all professional and personal ties of any significance, has been spent in quiet contemplation and solitary philosophical enquiry. I have been – let us not be circumspect – a long time indeed in the wilderness.

  What, then, has occasioned my return to this journal, its pages, like the skin of its author, thin, worn and showing advanced signs of age? What has made me write once more of myself?

  The answer is this: that an event has woken parts of my character that I had thought to have been forever buried, that the sight of a new face and the speaking of certain words has breathed again on embers in me and coaxed back into full flame the fires of an appetite which I have endeavoured in this long hermitage of mine to curb, to suppre
ss and to cast aside.

  It began this morning with a knock upon my study door. I was engaged in the perusal and study of certain antiquarian texts and, being cognisant of their fragility as well as their extreme rarity, I was careful to stow them away in the safest drawer of my desk before answering the bid for my attention with a sturdy “halloa!” It was, of course, Mrs Scott, my redoubtable, boot-faced housekeeper and maid of all work, the only representative of her sex nowadays with whom I pass any words of substance.

  Her face was arranged so as to suggest an emotion of which I would not hitherto have thought her capable, namely a crude species of curiosity.

  “Mrs Scott? What occasions this interruption?”

  “You have a visitor, sir,” said she, her rustic origins evident in every elongated syllable. “A fine young woman.”

  Even at these rare words I fancy that something shifted within me, that some new chain was forged.

  “Did she give her name?”

  In the manner of an angler presenting some oversized prize, Mrs Scott, with a decided flourish, produced a white business card. “See here.” And she passed the thing, with an odd admixture of wariness and pride, to me.

  I looked down with considerable interest, callers of any kind being a rarity and those of this stranger’s sex and age unprecedented, and I saw written there four words.

  The first, evidently the caller’s name, in bold type and gothic calligraphy, read:

  Underneath, in more modern print, ran the legend:

  TELLER OF TALES

  “How very intriguing,” I said. “Now, really I think it is high time that you showed this singular young lady in, Mrs Scott. Don’t you?”

  Given the consequences of so long and enforced a solitude, my imagination had, naturally enough, begun by this time to adopt the most fantastic postures. My breathing quickened and a raft of the most vivid and diverting imagery rose up before me. Those moments in which I was left alone in the study as Mrs Scott bustled in the hallways beyond were especially interminable.

  Nonetheless (and how I find my hand a-trembling as I consign these thoughts to this secret depository) their sequel was to surpass even the most idealistic of my fancies. For, a minute or so later, the housekeeper returned and in her wake was a young woman of the rarest and most striking aspect, brunette, not more than five and twenty and in possession of a truly wonderful silhouette.

  Her gaze met mine without the least sign of nervousness. She was dressed in a demure, even a somewhat antiquated fashion and her voice was gentle yet determined.

  “Professor Presbury, I presume?”

  I peeled back my lips. “I am most certainly he. To whatever do I owe this pleasure? Are we acquainted?”

  That dear lady shook her noble head. There was something sweetly feline in the gesture. “I fear I have not until today had the pleasure of making your acquaintance in person. Although, of course, I feel that I know you through your work, so much of which I have read with the keenest interest.”

  I waved away this compliment casually enough, although I admit that at the declaration I felt a distinct spasm of delight.

  “Yet I do believe,” she murmured, something quietly imploring now in her big hazel eyes, “that you once knew my late father.”

  “I may well have done,” I said. “Now what was that good man’s name?”

  “Lowenstein,” she replied and showed me her sharp white teeth.

  “Mrs Scott,” I said to that stout creature who had, throughout this conversation, lingered by the door. “Would you be so kind as to fetch Miss Lowenstein a pot of tea? Perhaps the walnut cake also? For this is somewhat in the spirit of a reunion, and we should mark it with all good things.”

  The domestic nodded gruffly. Miss Lowenstein seemed delighted. “I do so love walnut cake.”

  “Happy,” I said. “I am happy to oblige.”

  “And yet?”

  “Yes, Miss Lowenstein?”

  “Today is not meant merely as a means by which we might revisit the past.”

  “No?”

  “No indeed, Professor. For I have come here in large part for a single reason – to put to you a most remarkable proposition.”

  And so we sat and we took tea together and Miss Scheherazade Lowenstein put to me that proposal at which she had hinted. It is born, I think, at least in part from guilt at the role that her departed father played, however indirect and unwitting, in my fall from grace. It is, she says, loyalty that drives her, loyalty to her parent’s memory as well as a desire to restore honour to a family name, which is at present mired in disrepute. So she has sought me out to set things right. I have, after only the most perfunctory of protests, acceded to her request and I am, in two days time, to go to London where I shall be put up in the Bostonian Hotel in Bloomsbury and from where, Miss Lowenstein assures me, all that has been taken from me shall be once again restored.

  More than that – the specifics of what is to pass between us – I shall not write here. To do so would be to subject them to the cold and unforgiving light of reality whereas at present they have still in my mind the qualities of phantasy and delight. Yes, they have about them the sense of some strange and wonderful dream, which has lingered long into the waking hours.

  Telegram

  Sent: 4th January 1913

  From: Panjandrum

  To: Scheherazade

  Proposition accepted and subject gladly lulled. Suite in the Bostonian to be prepared for 6th January.

  Telegram

  Sent: 4th January 1913

  From: Scheherazade

  To: Panjandrum

  Congratulations. You are indeed a patriot. Report to me again in London.

  From the private journal of Professor C.R.H. Presbury

  5th January 1913

  I have spent today in preparation, not only of the practical kind – baggage to be packed; Mrs Scott to be informed and appraised of my imminent absence; arrangements to be set in motion for the temporary shutting up of the house – but also of an emotional, one might almost say spiritual, sort.

  There are parts of my soul that have long been left unvisited and it was to those that I tended this afternoon. Shortly before dusk I took a walk, as I have so often before, into those patches of woodland which abut this little village and there I took a moment to stand alone, to collect my thoughts, to reflect upon the errors of my personal history and – I do not flinch from such an admission – for the first time in far too many years, to pray. For an instant or two, I was lost in the gathering evening to something far greater than myself.

  Then I awakened from my reverie, turned and hurried back to my isolated little home. Such higher thoughts I leave here in the fens. In London I shall be all of the body – a corporeal and not a sacred being, devoted no longer to penitence but rather, I fancy, to the furtherance of sin.

  6th January 1913

  I write these words upon the train to the metropolis, the details of my long exile fading already into disagreeable memory. I think now only of what is ahead of me: of the Bostonian Hotel, of the rich and subtle pleasures of the city, of my particular appetites – for too long in abeyance – and of Miss Lowenstein’s white beguiling smile.

  Telegram

  Sent: 6th January 1913

  From: Scheherazade

  To: Panjandrum

  Subject arrived safely. Eager to commence first stage. Cannot recall an easier corruption. Request, as discussed, immediate release of funds.

  Telegram

  Sent: 6th January 1913

  From: Panjandrum

  To: Scheherazade

  Request accepted. Funds to be delivered in customary fashion. Thoughts of all the Service are with you.

  Telegram

  Sent: 7th January 1913

  From: Scheherazade

  To: Panjandrum

  We have him. Ready to begin second stage.

  From the private journal of Professor C.R.H. Presbury

  9th January 1913

 
You will forgive my absence from these pages in recent days. I have been engaged in alternative pursuits. I dare not provide complete details of my excursions even here. Let it suffice to report that the pleasure gardens of London are aptly named, that the diversions of Bloomsbury are various and plentiful, and that there is in this mighty capital no hunger that might not be anticipated, that might not be met with expertise and surpassed. To this I must add that Miss Lowenstein has proved to be an excellent and knowledgeable guide. It is difficult to imagine any father having been precisely proud of such a daughter but it is surely to be hoped that he might at least have respected her comfortable acceptance of her nature.

  The two days that I have spent here, in this marvellous hotel, have been unusually pleasant ones, unparalleled in the great majority of my adult life. Yet I am no longer a young man. I have not the vigour of my former days. I grow tired and I grow stale and I recollect the words of the Bard when he wrote of that rambunctious trickster that desire should so many years outlive performance. I had accepted the truth of the matter – that this delightful and unexpected sojourn had come to its natural conclusion, that my spirits were truly spent and that I would shortly have to contemplate a return to Cambridgeshire. Certainly, I considered any debt that might have been owed to me by the Family Lowenstein to have been paid in full and with considerable interest.

  It was with no small quantity of surprise, then, that I woke from a stupor this afternoon to discover that notable lady sitting at the foot of my bed with a small wooden box before her. I struggled upright and asked Scheherazade what it was that had brought her to my chamber in so unorthodox a fashion.

  Her reply, at first, was perhaps a little cryptic. “I see you,” she said. “And I know you also.”

  “Whatever do you mean by that, my dear?”