The Dragon Turn (4 page)

The gaslights were simultaneously dimmed in the house and brought up on the stage, and Dickens materialized, lit so starkly that his face, the creases in his pale skin, his very eyes, seemed to be just inches away. The crowd rose and the hall shook with the reception, but Dickens didn’t acknowledge them. He set his book down on his desk, placed one leg on a wrung, gripped his collar with his hands and said, in a voice as clear as a bell, “
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
 … the Court Room scene.” There was another ovation from the audience. And then he read. And as he read he transported every man, woman and child who watched and listened, to a courtroom in a story … that seemed more real than the theater itself. Soon, he had his spectators crying with laughter, amazed at the silliness, the ineptitude of his characters, and thus of all humanity. It made Sherlock think of how we all play roles, how we all want to BE someone, someone shiny, more important than who we really are.

When Dickens was done with that passage, he turned to something that made the audience gasp.
“The Adventures of Oliver Twist,”
he intoned. And after a dramatic pause, in which he seemed to eye every audience member, said, “Chapter Forty-seven … Fatal Consequences.” Everyone knew what that meant. He was going to read what he had once promised he would never read … the murder of Nancy, beautiful and honest Nancy … at the hands of her lover, the villainous house-breaker, Bill Sikes.

Dickens showed no mercy. He launched into the chapter, bringing the Jew, Fagin, to life, lisping and conniving, revealing to Sikes that Nancy had acted as an informant to good people who would take the boy, Oliver Twist, from his clutches and away from a life of thieving on London streets. A rage grows in the vicious thief. Murder is on his mind … a crime of passion.

Dickens, it was said, had not been well of late. His hair was thinning, and he looked slight and pale, as if he might be in pain. There were rumors that some of these performances left him prostrate for hours afterward.

Up on the stage he
became
Fagin, then Sikes out on the street, rushing toward the grimy one-room flat he shared with Nancy, so angry that had his pit bull, Bull’s Eye, not kept well ahead of him, he might have strangled it with his bare hands.

Sherlock heard women crying around him. Then Sikes did his terrible deed. He struck Nancy with the butt of his pistol, twice to her face. She staggered, bloodied … and he descended on her with his club. Dickens committed the crime
with his words, with his voice. And when he was finished, he looked out at his audience, to the people to whom he had told the brutal truth. He stepped from his desk and bowed. The applause began quietly, rising to a crescendo, still gaining volume as he exited.

Sherlock was enraptured. Though he had hoped to hear a chapter from
Bleak House
about Inspector Bucket, the first detective in English fiction, he was not disappointed with
Oliver Twist
. It is his favorite novel, a book about a boy and for boys. Sherlock had cheered louder than anyone else in St. James’s Hall that evening. Charles Dickens’ fame, his energy, his unmatched imagination, fired the boy with excitement. Holmes wasn’t bored, not for one second.

“I want to be alive like that,” Irene had said suddenly.

Sherlock had turned to her and smiled, both surprised and charmed. “So do I,” he replied, barely above his breath.

And now, as they walk home from witnessing the extraordinary events at The Egyptian Hall, where they had seen a real dragon appear onstage, where Hemsworth the magician was accused of the murder of his famous rival in a sensational case filled with enticing loose ends … Irene Doyle is challenging him to be alive again.

Who could resist such temptation?

THE BAIT IS TAKEN

“M
y boy!” exclaims Sigerson Bell the instant Sherlock Holmes arrives at their door. The old man hasn’t even seen him yet; the lad isn’t through the outer room into the back of the shop where they live, eat, experiment, and tangle with each other in brutal fashion during Bell’s lessons in the arts of self-defense. “I have been awaiting your arrival for I have been considering having us embark upon an investigation of the workings of the digestive system of the mammal, by thrusting our hands up to the elbows into the —”

Then the apothecary sees his charge and stops. Sherlock appears to be upside down. That is because Bell is hanging from the ceiling again, despite the fact that it is nearing ten o’clock in the evening. It is a practice he suggests to his patients, to facilitate the flow of blood to the brain; he also believes it will help correct the extraordinary curvature of his spine, which is in the shape of a question mark. His long hair descends a couple of feet below his scalp like a little white waterfall, and he is completely naked except for a tiny, tight loincloth. But the sudden halt of his speech hasn’t been
caused by the mere optical inversion of his apprentice — it is the look on the boy’s face.

He pulls his feet out from their harness and does a flip in the air, landing perfectly upright, not an inconsiderable performance for a man his age, which is somewhere between seventy and eight hundred and sixty-nine. Thankfully, he fetches a gold-colored smoking jacket and covers himself up.

“What has happened?”

It is an irritating talent: the old man’s ability to read Sherlock’s face as if it were a screaming headline in
The News of the World
. The boy thinks of himself as being so much more inscrutable than that. But he has learned to live with Bell’s great powers of observation and deduction, and also to keep very few secrets from him.

“It was the most extraordinary thing.” Sherlock seats himself on a stool at the laboratory table.

“I can see that. Were you not escorting Miss Doyle this evening? Is she trifling with your heart again? Sit down and I shall tender you some advice. I am a man of some experience in the mysterious ways of the fairer sex.”

“It is not that, sir. Miss Doyle was most cordial and we had a lovely evening until …”

“Until what?” Bell seizes another stool and pulls it up close to Sherlock, seating himself in a flash, his face inches from the boy’s, looking deeply into his eyes, irises snapping back and forth. His breath, fishy and full of the aroma of his favorite food — the foreign garlic onion — is enough to knock out a prizefighter. Sherlock pulls his stool back a few inches.

“We went to see Hemsworth.”

“Ah! The dragon man! Is it real?”

“It appeared to be.”

“I believe it! I believe there are dragons … somewhere! Mankind does not invent such stories out of thin air. If there are not dragons, there must be beasts much like them … perhaps the dinosaurs still roam on some far-off, undiscovered island!”

“It wasn’t that, sir. It was what happened afterward.”

“Afterward?”

Sherlock tells him. The old man listens, fascinated. When the boy is done, Bell rubs his chin. “Two celebrated men, a celebrated wife between them, and now … a sensational murder. A crime of passion! Irene Doyle has asked you to intervene.”

Sherlock, of course, hasn’t told him any such thing. This is irritating too … how Bell can take almost anything Holmes says and immediately deduce all sorts of other facts. Though the boy knows that he too, is often guilty of the very same maneuver, it still makes him want to scream.

“Yes, she has!”

“And shall you?”

“Uh …”

“Ah-ha! I knew it! You are back in harness!”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Nonsense! Where are we to start?”

“
We?
”

“I mean … you.”

“The crime scene, of course.”

“But you don’t know where it is.”

“I have the means to find out.”

Though the younger Lestrade is not blessed with either Sigerson Bell’s or Sherlock Holmes’s talent for deduction and observation, he has no trouble picking out the boy far down the street in Whitehall, near Scotland Yard, early the following morning; that, despite the flow of horses and hansom cabs moving along the cobblestones, and the pedestrians strolling on the footpaths. Holmes, of course, doesn’t dare stand on the south side near the police buildings. He is at the gates of the Admiralty across the thoroughfare, doing his best to look respectable and purposeful in his secondhand suit. He has a morning paper clutched under his arm, having plucked it from a dustbin. The Hemsworth arrest is splattered across the front page, though there is little of real news in it for Sherlock, other than the curious fact that Mrs. Nottingham has not yet been located by the police. Aware of the spectacular nature of this case, Scotland Yard is being tight-lipped about everything, including the location of the crime scene.

It is a Saturday morning, but Sigerson Bell, unable to resist his young charge’s interest in the sensational Hemsworth case, in fact, anxious to hear more of it himself, has given the boy several hours off from his chores at the laboratory. Cleaning bottles and flasks and polishing the three statues of Hermes can wait until noon.

Lestrade knows there is no sense avoiding Holmes.
Most days, he would be pleased to see the brilliant young half-Jew. The clues the lad has provided him over the past year or so have been most helpful not only to his career, but to his father’s opinion of him, and that is important, indeed. But the unfortunate coincidence of Holmes’s presence at The Egyptian Hall last night, in company with Miss Irene Doyle no less, has not been sitting well with young Lestrade all night. Now almost nineteen years old and a fully paid police employee, he is officially embarked on his career and lives for it. He never takes a Saturday off; and sometimes even comes to headquarters on Sundays, without saying a word to his father. Holmes, he knows, would be just as thoroughly pursuing a detective’s career of his own sort … if he weren’t younger and, most curiously, holding himself back.

The scrawny police detective in the loose, grown-up clothes always notices the lust for fighting evil in Sherlock’s eyes, and his effort to control it. That effort, as young Lestrade feared from a distance, does not appear to be present today when he sees him up close. He owes Sherlock Holmes, and that isn’t a good thing this late August morning.

“Master Holmes.”

“Master Lestrade.”

“I must apologize … I am in a most frightful hurry this forenoon.”

“Well, that is a coincidence, so am I.”

“You are?”

“I am. I must be at the scene of the Nottingham murder and back to my school at Snowfields within the hour. I am teaching summer classes.”

“You … must?”

“I must.”

“Well, you see … there is only one problem with that.”

“I am all ears.”

“And nose, too.”

Sherlock doesn’t smile.

“Master Holmes, as I’m sure you are aware,” he glances down at the newspaper under Sherlock’s arm, “the location remains a secret … you know I can’t —”

“Nonsense.”

“I hadn’t finished.”

“No need to. You shall tell me what I need to know. You forget, I am in a position to blackmail you.”

“By telling my father that it has been you who has been supplying the clues for our cases lately?”