Sherlock Holmes: The American Years (26 page)

We crossed swords and began our duel. The actors playing members of the Danish court were onstage with us, including Gertrude and Claudius. From where I stood, I could see the rest of the company standing in the wings, watching—including Lawrence Barrett, who was observing us with a keen expression on his face. He had come to the theatre, even though his scenes were not scheduled for rehearsal.

It was not unusual for other actors to watch the duel scene, but
I felt a shiver trickle down my spine as I touched swords with Nate.

At first the scene ran exactly as we had rehearsed it—but when the moment came for the first “touch,” when Laertes nicks Hamlet with what turns out to be a fatal wound, to my surprise, Nate seemed to lose his balance, and his sword actually raked across my face.

My left cheek stinging, I brought my hand to my face. There was a murmur from the wings, and several of the women gasped.

“Sorry!” Nate panted. “I lost my balance. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I replied, wiping away a trickle of blood from my cheek.

“Shall we stop?”

“No, no,” I said. “Let’s continue.”

I glanced at Holmes, who, as Horatio, was standing to one side of the other Danish courtiers. I thought I saw him nod almost imperceptibly, but perhaps I was mistaken. I returned to the duel.

It seemed to me that Nate was fighting with even more vigor than usual—he huffed and sweated and leapt from side to side, and more than once I had to dodge an unusually vigorous swipe of his sword. I had an impulse to stop and ask what had gotten into him, but something prevented me—a desire to not lose face in front of the rest of the company, maybe; or perhaps it was a darker, more self-destructive impulse.

When the moment came for Hamlet and Laertes to exchange swords—thus giving Hamlet the poisoned sword—he suddenly changed the blocking and lunged at me. Reacting completely on instinct, I dodged out of the way, dropped to the floor, and rolled to the other side of the stage. When I stood up I saw he was still charging toward me.

“Nate!” I panted. “For God’s sake, what are you
doing
?”

But he just roared with rage and kept coming at me. I rolled in the other direction, then suddenly realized I had dropped my sword and was defenseless. Backed up against the wall, I was cornered. I saw the glint of his steel blade headed toward my face, and closed my eyes, expecting the blow.

But it did not come.

When I opened my eyes, I saw that Holmes had taken up my sword and was fighting with Nate.

“Holmes!” I cried.

“Stay clear, Edwin!” he yelled back.

I had no choice but to obey. The blades were flashing silver in the stage lights, and to come anywhere near them was to risk serious injury. Though Holmes was clearly a skilled swordsman, Nate’s rage had turned him into a madman, and he sliced and jabbed with the fury of a man fighting to the death. It was all Holmes could do to stave off his vicious attack, parrying each thrust with an alert desperation. The rest of the company hovered in the wings, cowed by Nate’s rage. I grabbed a theatre page and drew him close to me.

“Run and fetch the police!” I hissed.

The boy nodded at me, his eyes wide with terror.

“Now!” I bellowed. “
Run!
”

He took off, scampering down the stairs and out through the back door. I turned back to the stage, where to my horror I watched Nate back Holmes into the opposite corner of the stage.

“Now,” he panted, lifting his sword over his head, “you will die too!”

Hardly aware of what I was doing, I sprang to my feet and hurled my body through the air, landing on Nate with a thud, knocking
him to the ground. He writhed and fought like a rabid beast, clawing and kicking at me. But Holmes snatched his sword, and three or four other members of the cast—including Larry Barrett—threw themselves upon him, helping to subdue him. We wrestled him to his feet—he continued to struggle, but he was outnumbered now, and we managed to hold him.

“Are you all right, Edwin?” Barrett asked, true concern in his voice.

“Yes, Larry—quite all right, thank you,” I said.

Nate Carlisle strained against his captors, trying vainly to wrest himself free. “Damn you, Edwin Booth—why aren’t you dead?” he panted. To my surprise, his accent was different—it was now decidedly Southern.

“I took the liberty of removing your sword from backstage and replacing it with another one,” Holmes said to him.

Nate turned his gaze on Holmes. “Damn you!” he gasped, still quite out of breath.

I stared at Holmes, confused.

“He had poisoned it,” Holmes told me. “So when he cut your face, he expected you to die—and when you didn’t, his plan was thrown off.”

I heard a collective gasp from the rest of the company.

“He hoped it would look like just another unfortunate accident,” Holmes explained.

Nate glared at Holmes and struggled, but his fellow actors held him firmly. “You—you—what
are
you, a wizard?”

“No; merely one who observes,” Holmes responded.

“I don’t understand, Nate,” I said. “Why would you want to kill me?”

“My dear Booth,” Holmes began, laying a hand on my shoulder.

“No, no—I want to hear,” I said, pulling away from him and facing Nate. “What I have I ever done to you?”

He wrenched a hand free and pulled a locket from his neck, throwing it at my feet. “This is my sister Daisy—the poor unfortunate girl your brother ruined. The day she died I vowed a Booth would die to avenge her!”

“But why? What have I to do with any of this?”

“Your wretched brother discarded her like he did so many other women,” he replied, in a voice choked with rage. “She never recovered, and when he shot Lincoln, she went mad from grief.”

“How is this my f-fault?” I stammered, my childhood affliction once again returning.

“Do you have
any
notion what it is like to endure the humiliation of Reconstruction? ‘Reconstruction’—ha! What a bitter joke!” He spat out the words, his eyes blazing with fury. “Lincoln was a tyrant, but when your brother killed him, the North took revenge upon us by humiliating us—if your cursed brother had not murdered that mountebank, things might have gone differently. And now my poor, sainted mother is dead—she died of grief and hardship! She never recovered from my sister’s madness—I watched her steady decline, until at last she died of a broken heart.”

“But I could not have prevented my brother’s—”

“Why not? If you had not been so absorbed in your own career, your
fame
, you might have noticed what he was planning! You were as blind to your own kin as a cart horse!”

“B-but I—” Once again I began to stutter painfully.

Holmes stepped forward and laid a hand on my arm.

“There is nothing more to be learned from this man,” he said in a low voice. “His mind is addled.”

I knew he was right, and yet I could not take my eyes from Nate’s face, red and twisted with fury. I felt that I was somehow looking at my own brother Johnny’s face. I was aware of Holmes’s hand on my arm, gently pulling me away, as half a dozen uniformed policemen strode purposefully down the aisles of the theater. The assembled company stood watching in silence as they climbed the stairs to the stage. It was as if we were the stunned spectators of a tragic play, waiting passively to see what would happen next.

“This is your man,” Holmes said to a burly, redheaded sergeant, indicating Carlisle.

The sergeant nodded and turned to his men, who quickly and expertly cuffed Carlisle’s hands behind his back and began to lead him away. He wrenched himself free for a moment and pivoted unsteadily back toward us.

“A curse on you and your family, Edwin Booth!” he managed to cry before the policemen set upon him again and dragged him away.

The red-haired sergeant approached me and coughed delicately.

“When you have a moment, we’d like to take a statement from you, Mr. Booth,” he said respectfully.

“Of course,” I replied, feeling light-leaded, with the unreal sensation that I was adrift in a horrible dream.

The sergeant turned to leave, but then turned back again.

“Uh, I—that is, well, sir, I want to say how much I enjoyed your Brutus in
Julius Caesar
last week. My wife, she . . . well, I wonder, sir,
if you would mind—perhaps this isn’t the time, but . . .” He fumbled in his pocket and extracted a small black notebook. On the cover, “
NYPD
” was embossed in gold lettering. “If you could just—it’s for my wife, you understand, sir.”

The sergeant’s face was a deep crimson, and he was sweating at the collar of his tight wool uniform.

“Of course, Sergeant,” I said, touched by his affection. Though both of my Marys had been taken from me—the first by death, the second by madness—how well I knew the bliss of having a wife to come home to.

I signed the paper and pressed it into the sergeant’s perspiring palms.

“Love her well,” I said. “Love her and care for her with all your heart.”

He looked at me, transparent pearls of sweat gathering on his broad forehead.

“I will, sir—th-thank you, sir,” he stammered, running a hand through his bristle of red hair. He grasped my hand and shook it vigorously. “Best of luck, sir—all the best to you.”

With that, he turned and hurried off after his officers. The company members stood in silence for a few more moments, then a low murmur began among them. They all seemed to be in shock, understandably, and I called off rehearsal for the rest of the day. They were quiet at first, still stunned by the sudden violence, but by the time everyone had their coats on, they were bursting with questions and demands for explanations. Some of them were making plans to head off for Tom’s Tavern, a favorite watering hole for theatre folks—run by an old former actor named, improbably enough, Thomas Lawless. Several of them importuned Holmes
and myself to join them. As is true of all actors, they thrived on drama no less than the sound of their own voices. Now that the danger had passed, they could savor the aftermath of the excitement in endless discussions, digressions, and dissections—and, best of all, countless drafts of whatever Tom happened to be serving.

However, I wanted nothing more than to sit and stare into the fireplace at the Players, a glass of brandy in my hand, the ever faithful Hector at my side.

Holmes and I hailed a cab and made our way back to the club. I said very little during the ride, being preoccupied with my own thoughts. Perhaps sensing my need for silence, Holmes stared out the window into the darkening streets.

When we were settled in front of the fire, I spoke at last.

“I want to thank you for everything you have done, Holmes—not only did you you save my life, but also—”

He silenced me with a wave of his hand. “I do not feel I was successful at all; after all, a man almost died because of my inability to anticipate the deviousness of this killer.”

The latest report on poor Geoffrey was that he would survive—thank God—but I took Holmes’s point.

“What made you think that Nate had poisoned his sword?”

“After the first disaster with poor Geoffrey, I kept a very close eye on all the props—especially the swords. And I took the liberty of following Nate Carlisle after rehearsal yesterday and noted that he paid a visit to a pharmacy.”

“So you think he bought the poison then?”

“I went in afterwards myself on the pretext of needing some valerian root, and managed to have a look at the receipt when the chemist’s back was turned. It was a curare derivative—very rare
and very deadly. A paralytic agent which, shortly after entering the bloodstream, causes paralysis and death. There is no known antidote. This was an example of life imitating art—a very deadly example.”

A thin, cold shiver slithered down my spine as I realized the truth of his statement, and I suddenly felt the full impact of my narrow escape.

“How did you know he would use the poison on the sword?”

“I didn’t know for certain—that’s why I had to find out what would happen if I switched the swords. It wasn’t enough that he bought the poison—that in itself is no crime, and he could always claim that he purchased it to poison rats or some other vermin. No, he had to be caught red-handed, as it were.”

“What made you suspect him in the first place?”

“In some ways it was a process of elimination. But one or two things he said or did led me to think he was the most likely culprit.”

“Such as—?”

“For one, his pronounced grief at the death of Kitty’s dog, and his attempt to console her, struck me as unusual—unless he was somehow responsible.”

“What else?”

“His background was shadowy. You said he came to you on recommendation from a theatre company in Savannah.”

“Yes. He presented me with a letter.”

“How well do you know that city?”

“Not well. I traveled there once with my father.”

“Well, I sent a telegram to the address on that letter, and there is no such theatre.”

“Good heavens—my poor Mary always said I was too trusting of people.”

“You are a very busy man. Savannah is far enough away that he assumed you would be unlikely to check on the reference.”

“True; I often hire actors on a single recommendation. I can always fire them if they are inadequate to the task.”

“That is precisely what young Carlisle was counting on—which is why he came with his part perfectly learned. As you pointed out, he is quite a good actor, so you were not likely to fire him. And, I suspect, faking a recommendation is perhaps not unusual in the theatrical community.”

I sighed ruefully. “You’re quite right—even had I found out the letter was false, I still probably would have chalked it up to the eagerness of a young actor to find employment.”

Holmes smiled. “There was one more thing.”

“What was that?”

“As I just remarked, he is a gifted actor.”

“Yes, that’s true. But what—?”

“And he did a credible job of pretending to be a Northerner.”

“Yes, his accent was quite convincing.”

“I agree—except for one small thing.”

“What’s that?”