Authors: Dan Simmons
At any rate, Carlo chews out Mr. Rucastle’s throat, Dr. Watson with his trusty service revolver “blew its brains out” (but too late, alas!), and a suddenly helpful Mrs. Toller explains the entire plot, the need for Rucastle to fake his daughter Judy’s death (for inheritance reasons!) and hide her away in the locked wing, and the whole pantomime of Violet Hunter being made to impersonate Judy so that the daughter’s persistent fiancé (a “Mr. Fowler” whom Violet Hunter glimpsed in her mirror) will give up, accept Judy’s death, and go away.
In one final paragraph all the loose ends are tied and tidied up—we never meet Judy or Mr. Fowler, but hear from the narrator that they were married and that the lucky groom is now “the holder of a Government appointment in the Island of Mauritius”, and that Miss Violet Hunter has gone on (perhaps with the help of Sherlock Holmes?) to be “the head of a private school at Walsatt”. (A rather good job for a young woman with no real references who admitted in the story that she had as skills “only a little music, a tiny bit of French and German”.)
Henry James, setting the finished book on his bedside table, again has to press his knuckles against his lips lest an audible laugh escape.
The writer—Dr. John H. “James” Watson? Arthur Conan Doyle? A bizarre blend of the two hacks?—has forgotten all about the son, Edward. The boy with the “oversized head” and reported penchant for evil. It’s obvious that all of the characters, including his former governess, Miss Hunter, had also forgotten that Edward was supposed to exist. With the happy ending of Mr. Rucastle having his throat torn out by a hungry and impossibly baying mastiff, Edward just seems to have vanished.
Poof!
Lying in the warm darkness, James thinks of a future story about a governess that he’s contemplated writing from time to time: his story, should he ever write it, would be from the governess’s mentally clouded point-of-view and would deal with a palpable—although imagined—evil that seems to threaten the child or children in the remote country house. James sees it as a ghost story without any certain ghost and knows it will require the lightest and subtlest of touches to make the increasingly nervous reader begin to wonder if the governess is insane . . . or evil . . . or if it is the children who are evil. Or perhaps there is a ghost (or ghosts, James hasn’t decided), despite all the psychological suggestions to the contrary.
His brother William would almost certainly like such a “psychological” tale.
All James knows for certain is that the tale will require all of his hard-earned skills and the most delicate of authorial brushstrokes to help the reader slowly become aware of the multiple levels of honesty, lying, guilt, and innocence—not even to mention survival—even while keeping the story explicit enough to chill the reader to goosebumps. But everywhere and always he will have to leave the reader in deep doubt about what has “really” happened and which of the events are only in the increasingly unstable governess’s mind.
Smiling slightly from the pathetic absurdities of the “Copper Beeches” and thinking ever so gently of ghosts and of the human mind in murky conflict with itself, Henry James falls asleep in the warm Washington night.
S
unday was quiet in the sprawling Hays household—at least until Henry James cornered Sherlock Holmes.
Clara Hay had gone to church after informing everyone that she would be doing some charity volunteer work for hours after the church service proper. John Hay had hosted his two guests at breakfast but then disappeared into his beautiful study for hours of his own sort of literary or historical devotion. The huge home was quiet except for the reassuring sound of horses’ hooves and buggy wheels on the street outside and the occasional nunlike hushed rustle of servants moving efficiently to and fro within the light-filled, mahogany-scented mansion.
It was late morning when Henry James knocked on “Jan Sigerson’s” guest room door. Holmes, smoking cheap shag tobacco in his disreputable black clay pipe, let the writer in and beckoned to an extra chair near the window where he’d been reading. James was carrying a book of his own but he carefully kept the cover and spine hidden while the two men took their seats.
“Clarence King will be here in a few hours,” said James.
“Yes,” said Holmes. “I’m very much looking forward to meeting him.”
“I think you should not.” Henry James’s soft voice could be firm to the point of hardness when he willed it to be. He willed it so now.
“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 thought 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.”