The Revenant of Thraxton Hall: The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (3 page)

Still reeling, Conan Doyle allowed himself to be dragged inside. As they slammed the doors on the unruly mob, a vegetable avalanche drummed against the glass.

“Mister Smith is waitin’, sir. We’d best go straight up.”

Conan Doyle snatched his coat sleeve from the young man’s grip, refusing to be manhandled any further. “Enough!” he barked. “I can see for myself the tenor of the situation.” He agitatedly brushed shreds of cabbage and splattered tomato from his shoulders and coat sleeves. Feeling eyes upon him, he looked up. The normal hubbub of the office was silent. Pressmen, reporters, runners, every man-jack in the place was staring at him, their ink-smeared faces etched with the doomed resignation of passengers on board a sinking ocean liner—and he was the captain who had steered them onto the rocks.

*   *   *

“I see that I am the most hated man in London,” Conan Doyle said as he entered the office of Herbert Greenhough Smith,
The Strand Magazine
’s senior editor.

Smith was barely visible behind collapsing heaps of mail stacked high on his desk. “H.G.” was a man in his thirties with round glasses and a bushy moustache that challenged Conan Doyle’s in its extravagance. He looked up with the bleary, bloodshot eyes of a man who has enjoyed little sleep in days.

“I think you underestimate public sentiment, Arthur. You would have been more popular had you beaten the prime minister to death with a puppy whilst he was speaking before a crowd of widows and orphans.”

Conan Doyle ground his molars as he pondered the remark. He indicated the letter-strewn desktop with a distracted wave. “All this?”

“Hate mail,” Smith answered flatly, crumpling a letter in his hand.

“Good Lord,” Conan Doyle breathed, sinking into a chair. “All since publication of ‘The Adventure of the Final Problem’?”

H.G. Smith sighed and shook his head. “No. This is just the morning post! We receive another sackful with every post. We’ve begun heating the offices with them.”

Smith tossed the crumpled letter into an overflowing wastebasket and cast an accusative stare at Doyle. “We’ve stopped replying to the letters. We haven’t the staff.”

Conan Doyle cleared his throat and quietly said, “This shall pass, H.G., I promise you.”

The editor slumped in the chair, his face tragic. “Will it, Arthur? On news of the death of Sherlock Holmes we received twenty thousand canceled subscriptions. Twenty thousand!
You
may survive the death of Sherlock Holmes; I’m not sure
The Strand
will.”

“
The Strand Magazine
and I are in good accounts. Fear not. I shall not abandon you.”

“But why, Arthur? Why kill Sherlock Holmes?”

“Why? Because the stories are mere conundrums. Always an impossible murder inside a locked room. Cryptic final words scrawled in the victim’s own blood. Inscrutable ciphers. Clues scattered here and there among the paragraphs like scraps of rubbish snagged in a hedgerow. The grand reveal at the end. It’s little more than a conjuring trick performed at a child’s birthday party. It is turning my brain into porridge and my reputation into a mere scribbler of penny dreadfuls. I believe it’s high time I left such unprofitable nonsense behind.”

The senior editor choked on an ironic laugh. “Hardly unprofitable, Arthur. Holmes has made you a rich man.” His eyes widened in alarm as a sudden thought struck him. “No! Please don’t tell me you’re entertaining wild notions of returning full-time to medicine?”

Conan Doyle bit the inside of his cheek and ruffled his moustache in irritation. Despite all his studies, his medical career had been a complete flop. It was a truth he did not care to admit to—even to himself. For years he had spent his days writing stories in his doctor’s office, blissfully uninterrupted by the nuisance of patients.

“In all honesty, I am weary of the man,” Conan Doyle grumbled. “Do you know I receive letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes asking for autographs? People confuse the puppet with the puppet master.” He snorted and continued, “I am afraid that Sherlock Holmes is keeping me from greater things.”

“I don’t see what the problem is, Arthur. You’re a fast writer. You can knock out a story in two weeks! Surely you can continue to write a story a month—or every other month—in between—”

“No. It’s not just that. I feel he is sapping me, like a psychic vampire, draining me.”

“I like that idea!” Smith said, suddenly energized. “Sherlock Holmes and the case of the psychic vampire! It has a ring—”

“No, H.G., stop! I am done with Holmes. Now and forever. I will not change my mind.”

“But he’s made
you
, Arthur. He’s made
The Strand
.” Smith’s pleading tone had devolved to a whine.

“I have many more ideas besides Sherlock Holmes.”

“I have no doubt of that, Arthur, but surely—”

Conan Doyle shook his head, threw back his shoulders, and hooked his thumbs behind the lapels of his overcoat. “Many ideas, my friend. Ideas that will soon make the public forget Sherlock Holmes. Ideas that will have a real impact on the world.”

Both men flinched as the office window behind H.G. Smith exploded inward, showering glass upon them. A huge cobblestone dug fresh from the road bounced off the desk and caromed forward, straight at Conan Doyle’s chest. But thanks to reflexes honed by years of playing cricket, he deftly caught it in his large hands.

Smith leapt to his feet. “My God!” he gasped. “Are these people insane? That could have killed either one of us!”

“Very easily,” agreed Conan Doyle, hefting the weighty stone in his hand. “I’ll say this, though: whoever threw this stone has a hell of an arm—he should be bowling for the England cricket team.” He thumped the cobble onto the desk in front of him. “But I’m afraid it has served only to make my decision final and utterly irrevocable. The world has seen the last of Sherlock Holmes.”

Both men suddenly noticed the scrap of paper tied to the cobble with a grubby length of twine. Conan Doyle snatched the paper free and peeled it open. His eyes scanned the note and a deeply sad smile formed beneath his walrus moustache.

“What does it say?” Smith demanded.

Conan Doyle held up the paper to show him. The message was short and to the point—a single word bleeding ominously through the paper in a scrawl of red ink:

Murderer.

CHAPTER 3

WILDE IN THE CITY

Although it was barely 3:00
P.M.
, the city was smothering beneath one of the dense, yellow, soot-choked fogs known as a “London particular.” In the unnatural twilight, amber haloes trembled about the streetlamps as the hansom dropped Conan Doyle at the front door of the Savoy.

Inside, the restaurant bustled with warmth and life and light. The author was a frequent guest at the Savoy and his entrance typically caused no excitement. But tonight, as he scanned the tables looking for the person he was meeting, heads turned and flung cold, belligerent stares in his direction. A moment later he noticed, with unease, that many of the diners also wore black armbands.

Bad news had beaten him there.

Instinct told Conan Doyle to put his head down and keep walking, as a moving target was harder to hit. Then his glance happened to fall upon a lone figure sitting at a corner table: a small schoolboy hiding behind an obviously false moustache. But then the boy made eye contact and Conan Doyle recognized it was a false child with a real moustache: J.M. Barrie, playwright and close friend, with whom he had a dinner engagement. A year ago, Conan Doyle and Barrie had pooled their collective genius to collaborate on
Jane Annie
, a comic opera commissioned by Richard D’Oyly Carte. The play had been a resounding catastrophe, jeered by audiences and pilloried by critics. After each excruciating performance, the friends had slunk away to salve their wounds with a whiskey or three. Thankfully,
Jane Annie
closed after only fifty performances—before either man suffered permanent liver damage.

As Conan Doyle squeezed through the tight sprawl of tables, the diminutive Barrie (who at scarcely five feet in height was often mistaken for a schoolboy) rose from his chair to greet him.

“J.M.,” said Arthur, swallowing the smaller man’s hand in his own fleshy grip.

“Arthur.”

A waiter appeared and hovered as the two settled into their chairs. Conan Doyle noticed a half-drained tumbler of scotch in front of his friend.

“I am drinking the holy waters of Mother Scotland,” Barrie said, rolling the r’s in his rich brogue.

“I, too, am in dire need of baptism,” Conan Doyle replied. He nodded to the waiter and said, “Same for me, Henry—and make it a triple snit.”

Although both men were Scottish born, after living in England for most of his life Conan Doyle’s Edinburgh accent had been polished to a soft burr.

“Ach!” Barrie said, eyebrows arching in surprise. “A triple snit this early? I take it you’ve had a bad day, Arthur?”

“A quite beastly day,” Conan Doyle snarled, pausing as the waiter set down a scotch in front of him. He then added: “Extraordinarily bad!” He quaffed a mouthful of whiskey, shuddering as it burned down his throat, then wiped a napkin across his moustache and fixed Barrie with his intense brown gaze. “But let me tell you how it began, with an encounter the like of which would seem fantastical even in a tale of fiction—”

“Ah, here is London’s most celebrated murderer!” The voice that interrupted him was loud, urbane, and utterly unforgettable. Conan Doyle looked up at a large man dressed in a bottle-green cloth overcoat heavily trimmed with fur. The coat was worn thrown about his shoulders like a cape and splayed open to reveal a lemon-yellow jacket with a white silk cravat. On his head he wore a black broad-brimmed hat pulled down rakishly over one eye.

Oscar Wilde—of course, who else would dress in such a fashion? He was accompanied by a slender young man who stood too close to Wilde’s shoulder, the way a pilot fish rubs up against the flanks of a shark. The young man was tall and thin with slender wrists and high cheekbones. He wore his short blond hair curled and brilliantined. With extravagant eyelashes and features as delicate as a porcelain doll’s, he was altogether too pretty to be a boy. He never looked directly at Conan Doyle or Barrie, but peered at them shyly from the corner of one eye. Conan Doyle shifted in his chair with growing discomfort. Rumors about Wilde flew on the wind these days, and this was obviously Oscar’s latest “companion.”

“Hello, Arthur,” Wilde said, and then appeared to start and made a show of peering down at Barrie, as if he could not quite make him out. “Why, is that you down there J.M.?” he queried. “Ah yes, I see the moustache if not the man it’s attached to. Honestly, J.M., if it were not for your enormous talent it would be so easy to miss you.”

Wilde’s closest friends were often the butt of his wit, but it was never with any malice.

“Ach, it would be hard to miss you, Oscar, in any crowd,” the diminutive Scotsman retorted before dunking his moustache back into his whiskey.

“Really? I am told people miss me the moment I leave the room.” Wilde punctuated his remark with a ridiculous, self-mocking smile and everyone chuckled. It was impossible to be in a bad mood when Oscar Wilde was present.

Wilde threw himself into an empty chair, shrugged the coat from his shoulders, and drew off his hat with a flourish, releasing his long chestnut curls. The young man pulled his chair closer to Wilde and perched delicately.

“And who is this, er,
friend
, of yours, Oscar?” J.M. asked in a tone so pointedly ironic it made Conan Doyle cringe.

“This is George…” Wilde said, and added in an exaggeratedly posh voice, “… also of the theater.”

Wilde noticed the heavy glass tumblers of scotch set in front of each man. “Ah, good whiskey, the official drink of any wake. I take it we are lamenting the loss of the much-loved Sherlock Holmes. I shall join you in a glass to see the old man off, but then we must switch to champagne, as befitting any celebration.”

The waiter brought a whiskey for Wilde, but nothing for his young companion. Wilde sipped his whisky and smiled joyously. “Mmmmmn!” he breathed, smacking his lips. “Could anything but whiskey slake a true Irishman’s thirst?” He patted his young companion on the knee. “I’m afraid George here does not drink. Quite reprehensible isn’t it? I’ve always said that an absence of vices is a vice in and of itself.”

Wilde quaffed his whiskey in three deep gulps, then semaphored the waiter with a flourish of his handkerchief. Moments later, a huge magnum had been cracked and each man held a freshly charged champagne flute.

“What are we celebrating, Oscar?” Conan Doyle asked, wondering if Wilde had a new play opening that he had somehow failed to hear of.

“What are we celebrating?” Wilde repeated, flashing his long-toothed smile. “Surely my arrival is always a cause for celebration!”

As usual, Wilde’s personality engulfed the table, preventing any chance of normal conversation. Conan Doyle studied Wilde’s animated face as he launched into another witticism.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
had been a resounding success the previous year, making him the wealthiest and most successful man of letters in London. But despite Wilde’s beautiful wife and two children, his enthusiasm for the companionship of young men had lately become a virulent source of scorching gossip.

“I offer a toast,” Wilde said, mildly slurring. “A toast to the ghost of Sherlock Holmes. May he watch over poor Arthur and keep him safe in his dotage.”

“
To Sherlock Holmes.
”

Champagne flutes chinked, everyone smiling and laughing as they imbibed. Everyone except Conan Doyle, who choked down a mouthful of chilled Dom Pérignon along with the last of his pride.

Suddenly, Wilde rose from the table, drew on his coat and hat, and then seized the champagne bucket and tucked it under one arm.

“And now Oscar Wilde must take his leave. Come along chaps. I have a four-wheeler waiting outside to convey us to our next destination.”

“I’m afraid I have a train to catch, Oscar,” Conan Doyle said. “My wife—”