Good Night, Mr. Holmes (49 page)

“That is the only drawback to the incident,” Irene said with great sympathy, “that it has distressed you and may distress others who know us.”

“Otherwise,” Godfrey went on cheerfully, “it could not have been better. We had cancelled our trip to Italy when we heard that you at last would honor us with a visit. Apparently, our names remained on the passenger list. Irene need not worry about the King pursuing her now.

“Or Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” I added.

“Or Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” Irene said.

“Or Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” Casanova parroted.

We laughed in a chorus.

Irene settled into her chair like a child preparing for a favorite bedtime story. ‘Tell me again, dear Nell,” she purred, “what they said when they found us fled and the house empty?”

“You know it all backwards and forwards.”

“Willie actually said that my word was inviolate?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Holmes really refused the King’s emerald ring and would take only my photograph as payment?”

“There is nothing ‘only’ about your photograph,” Godfrey put in.

“Have I ever lied?” said I.

“Almost never.” Irene frowned. “And Mr. Holmes said that he could
testify
that we made a handsome couple?”

I nodded wearily.

Irene stared toward Casanova happily gnawing a corncob hi his cage. “And he also said that he was certain that Godfrey and I would
remain
healthy, wealthy and wise?”

“Yes! Do you wish me to consult my diaries for the exact phrasing?”

“No, Nell, no... it is just that Mr. Holmes’s final remarks are most intriguing—almost as if he knew more than he really ought to by rights... but that is the past, and the future lies before us like one great, plump teacake. We must not dwell on old puzzles.”

It was I who injected a graver note. “But Irene, you will not be able to perform publicly if you tolerate this notion that you are dead.”

Her face sobered. “No, but it seems the wisest course. We can always resurrect ourselves, can we not, Godfrey? I have always wanted to come back from the dead; it is so dramatic.”

“Then indeed you shall,” Godfrey promised, leaning close to pat her hand. “Whenever you wish.”

“What a sense of power; it almost surpasses performing! Don’t worry, Nell, I sing for myself—and my friends. And perhaps some curiosities will come my way.”

“Paris, is fully as rife with sin and crime as London, I assure you,” I said.

“But the weather is better,” Godfrey put in, “and would be even more so, Nell, if you would join us in enjoying it.”

“That brings us to your present.” Irene rose and left the room. I admit that I did cherish the hope of another loose stone from the now-separated Zone... something discreetly large that would look well in a modest brooch....

Irene returned with her hands full. Dangling from them was a zone of fur—the limp form of the largest, fattest, furriest black Persian cat I had ever seen.

“Meet Lucifer,” Irene said. “He is ‘Parisian,’ if you will. We felt, Godfrey and I, that you needed something to remind Casanova of his p’s and q’s.”

“Not more of the alphabet, Irene, you haven’t really! You haven’t increased his vocabulary while Casanova and I have been visiting you?”

“But of course she has,” Godfrey said, watching as Irene laid the feline beast across my lap. “Up to P-Q-R.”

“He reminds me of your old muff,” I observed, mollified.

“Hmm. There are probably as many teacakes in him as there ever were in the secret pockets in my muff.”

“He has a sweet tooth?”

“Indeed; he should find Casanova particularly toothsome.”

“I am not sure that my current landlady would accept a cat,” I began.

“Then replace the landlady, my dear Nell” Godfrey suggested as he lit one of Irene’s revolting little cigarettes for her. “We come highly recommended.”

“You are not serious!”

“Indeed we are,” Irene said. “We have grown used to your assistance.”

“And your good sense,” Godfrey added.

“We really cannot do without you, dear Nell.”

“But,” I mumbled, “your... wedded bliss surely would not welcome a witness.”

Irene laughed until Godfrey joined her... and I and Casanova... and, I swear, the cat.

“We have had several months of ease and idleness,” she said. “Now, it is time to
work.”

“Yes,” said I, setting Lucifer aside. He revealed a rosebud tongue and began lashing his silver ruff into a halo of angelic beauty. “What is the first order of business?”

“A toast to our success,” Irene said, lifting her wine glass.

“At what?” I wondered.

“At whatever we elect to do,” Godfrey said.

I should have known better than to expect logic from them.

I hoisted my Vichy water as Casanova began cawing, “Cut the cackle” by the window. Lucifer turned his head and tumbled soundlessly to the floor. Then a low black shadow was sidling along the carpet toward the cage.

Irene paused for attention, looking as pleased as Lucifer.

“And,” she said, theatrically lifting her voice as well as her wineglass, “I do believe we owe the past one last bow. A toast, my dears: Good night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes—wherever you are.”

NEXT . . .

CODA

The foregoing
collation integrates the diaries of Penelope Huxleigh, recently (and ironically) found in an abandoned safe-deposit box at a Shropshire bank, with fragments of previously unknown writings attributed to John H. Watson, M.D.

Alert readers will notice discrepancies between this work and the story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” first published in the July 1891 issue of the
Strand magazine
of London. That purported “fiction” was written by the same Dr. Watson who chronicled other exploits of Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective.

These Holmes tales—a
century after their creation— stand as sacred cows to many, who regard them as not only literal truth but unbiased reportage. To such enthusiasts, any objective re-evaluation of such sanctified bovine conventions raises a red flag: it is viewed as an attack on the “Canon.”

True Holmes fanatics occupy two equally ridiculous camps: one holds that the tales as written by a historical Dr. Watson comprise authentic Victoriana and therefore cannot be challenged as to full candor or veracity; the other, even more extreme camp avers that a Scottish medical man of Irish antecedents, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, authored these pieces as pure fiction. This is patently ludicrous.

More sensible students conducting post mortems on the Sherlock Holmes literary corpus agree that Doyle merely acted as literary agent for the actual, retiring—if not completely anonymous—Dr. Watson.

Now new evidence offers an opportunity to put the Holmes As Literary Invention theory on its ear, where it rightfully belongs. The Huxleigh diaries prove that Irene Adler, at least, was no fiction and thus lend credence to the actual existence of Holmes, Watson et al. The foregoing collation also supports a new and startling revelation: that, whatever its origin,
some
authentic Holmes material was
suppressed.

These new-found fragments, integrated with the Huxleigh accounts, make superior chronological and narrative sense of many discrepancies in the so-called Canon, the very inconsistencies that fuel the arguments of those who would debunk Holmes, his cases and his contemporaries as mere fictional creations.

Literary suppression—particularly of memoirs—was all too common in nineteenth-century England. Consider Richard Burton (the
other
one, an explorer and translator of “The Arabian Nights”), whose unpublished writings were burned on his death by his prudish (Victorians would have said
prudent)
widow.

Similarly, witness the long loss to history of the Huxleigh account with its frank and surprising depiction of a liberated American woman in Victorian England. It differs significantly from the then-dominant male view, evident even in the Holmes stories, in which women swooned with “brain fever” at the first sign of crisis.

As Dr. Watson observes in a rediscovered Holmes text, “Irene Adler did not swoon.” Exactly! And exactly why her unexpurgated adventures were suppressed—certainly through the modesty of her chronicler and later by other “judges” of their suitability for publication.

We will never know the diaries’ full history; the principals are long since dead, though Holmes fanatics persist in granting their hero immortality, as if actuality were not enough. No such claque avers the same for Irene Adler, another symptom of surviving male chauvinism in the worlds of history and letters, if not fiction.

Understandably, Irene Adler’s strong sense of personal liberty would have been scandalous in her day—the men’s “walking clothes” and cigarettes, her theatrical profession and excursions into problem solving if not crime solving— but the Huxleigh diaries contradict Watson’s assertion in “A Scandal in Bohemia” that Adler was sexually promiscuous (an “adventuress... of dubious and questionable memory”).

The Huxleigh accounts testify that Irene Adler was
not
one of the socially ambitious, sexually pragmatic women then labeled adventuresses. Though Penelope Huxleigh remains reticent on the issue of Adler’s past, the opera singer—during her years with the parson’s daughter, through her liaison with the King of Bohemia and up to her marriage to Godfrey Norton—avoided compromise in fact if not in appearance.

Cynics might argue that Irene Adler was unchaperoned in Bohemia, but Adler herself tells Penelope that the King has been “patient.” Indeed, his fury at her defection smacks more of a forever-frustrated suitor than of a man losing a mistress.

Another discrepancy exists: the Huxleigh account shows Holmes visiting Godfrey Norton’s chambers twice, yet the detective appears to know nothing of Norton (and the Zone of Diamonds) in “A Scandal in Bohemia.”

Two possibilities occur: Holmes kept his fruitless pursuit of the Zone from Watson, not wishing to appear fallible in his chronicler’s eyes, or...
Watson himself
suppressed the Master’s significant failure in that regard, especially since Holmes failed to acquire the photograph that was his immediate object in the story as it stands.

Losing
two
elusive objects would have been more than even Holmes’s reputation could have survived.

The new material only clouds the matter of Watson’s marriage—to whom, how many times and when. Here he clearly was wed by March of 1888. Citations in the Doyle/Watson material confirm this, although they also have Watson not meeting Mary Morstan until
July
of that year. This leads some foolish apologists to assign Watson
two
wives during his association with Holmes. The truth remains elusive, as does much involving this controversial figure and his biographer.

Another minor inconsistency persists, even in the face of the Huxleigh revelations.

In “A Scandal in Bohemia” the King claims that he met Irene Adler in Warsaw five years earlier. The Huxleigh papers show Adler meeting the King in 1886 and fleeing Bohemia in 1887, only a year prior to March 1888, when Watson dates “A Scandal in Bohemia” as occurring.