The Sherlockian

CHAPTER 37 A Death in the Family

December 1,1900

“Come at once,” read the telegram. “Please.” It was signed simply “B.S.”

Arthur was angry, but he went all the same. It was the sort of message that Holmes was always sending to Watson in his stories, and Bram knew it. What gall! To drag Arthur back into this horrible affair without even the courtesy of an explanation. It was conduct unbefitting a man of Bram’s stature, and especially a friend of Bram’s caliber. “Come at once.” For heaven’s sake. Arthur would have liked to think that Bram was a better man than to commit such skulduggery.

Arthur received the message a little after three in the afternoon and managed to make the 3:55 for Waterloo. From there it was but a twentyminute ride in a two-wheeler to get to Bram’s home along St. Leonard’s Terrace, Kensington.

He couldn’t imagine what Bram had found that was so urgent that Arthur had to drop his day’s cricket and head into the city. It was assuredly nothing, of course. Bram most likely just could not accept Arthur’s refusal to further engage in detective work. But to tantalize him like this… to tease him with the promise of clues! It was like holding cheap gin under the nose of a recovering dipsomaniac. Arthur would not forget this.

Nor, obviously, would he take the bait. He would go to St. Leonard’s Terrace, yes, and he would see what Bram was making such a fuss about. And then he would explain, calmly and resolutely, that he was of an age too advanced for such follies. If Bram wanted to continue his investigations, Arthur would not stand in his way. But for Arthur there would be no more interviewing of witnesses and no more sniffing of rancid bloodstains. The circus had left town, and Arthur would not travel with it.

Number 18, St. Leonard’s Terrace was rather larger than Arthur had remembered. Four years previously Bram had moved here from Number 19-he’d moved all of one house over in order to acquire an extra floor. The new house was re-created like the old one, almost down to the positioning of the vases in the drawing room. It was a move so very like Bram-expensive, a touch indulgent, and yet meticulous in its labors. There were rumors that Bram had been forced to borrow around town in order to pay for the new furnishings. Some said six hundred pounds from Hall Caine alone, while others said as much as seven hundred. But there were always rumors, and Arthur paid them little mind. And it was not as if it were Arthur’s place to ask. He and Bram knew enough about each other’s sins and shortcomings at this point. There was no cause for adding weight to the scales.

The butler recognized his face, and before Arthur had a chance to speak, the man issued a polite, “Right this way, Dr. Doyle.

“Mr. Stoker has been expecting you,” added the butler for effect.

“Yet I suspect he’ll be disappointed when he finds me,” said Arthur.

The house was both dark and ornate. It received little light from the street outside, despite the fact that it was buttressed to the south by the open parks of the Royal Hospital. The windows were too small, thought Arthur, and there were not enough of them. The drawing room seemed sodden with a princely and expensive gloom. The golds and silvers of the exposed tea set were transmuted into bronze by the pervasive dim. The lush reds of the oil paintings on the wall were darkened into bloody browns.

As Bram turned from his desk, Arthur saw that he was in the midst of lighting his cigar. The match burst orange light into the room and then was squashed out quickly with a blow from Bram’s lips. Cigar smoke trailed into the darkness above.

“I don’t care what you have to tell me,” Arthur began. “I haven’t the faintest interest in knowing who killed Emily Davison.”

Bram simply stared.

“Very well,” he said at last. “Thank you for making me aware. But that’s not why I asked you here.”

“Oh,” was all Arthur managed in reply. It had not occurred to him that Bram could have asked him over to discuss anything other than the murders.

“Oscar is dead.”

It took Arthur a long moment to understand what Bram was saying.

“… Wilde?” asked Arthur lamely.

Bram nodded. Who else would it have been?

Arthur sat down on a plush chair. He allowed his body to tumble into it as if he were diving bottom-first off a cliff.

“Where?” he asked. “When?”

“Paris. Did you even know that’s where he’s been? I didn’t. He’s been two years in the Hôtel d’Alsace. I never sent him a letter, or even a bloody note. Did you? Well, no. Of course you didn’t. He died sometime yesterday. Florence, of all people, got a telegram this morning, and she informed me.” Bram sighed. “Since he was released from prison, we didn’t offer him so much as a kind word, did we? We left the poor chap to drink and bugger himself to death on the Continent.”

Arthur didn’t take kindly to the implied accusation in Bram’s tone.

“And what were we to do?” he said. “Oscar had…proclivities. He was drawn inexorably to sin. It is a tragedy that such a great man was brought so low by vice. But the villain here is the vice, not you and I.”

“Vice?” said Bram. “Do you think that’s what killed him? No. A vice is a thing which may be applauded in moderation but becomes horrific in overuse. Morphine is splendid by the ounce, but it’s a vice by the gallon. A healthy desire for one’s wife, that’s a virtue. But a compulsive desire for another, however… well, that’s a vice that will do a man ill.”

Bram looked Arthur dead in the eyes. Arthur wondered if he was referring to Jean, if Bram was judging him. Well, so what if he was?

“No,” Bram continued. “It wasn’t the vice that killed Oscar. It was the loneliness.”

“Do you remember that night we met, he and I?” said Arthur. “At that dinner in the Langham Hotel? Wait, no, you weren’t there. It was hosted by Joseph Stoddart, of Lippincott’s. Oscar was so deliriously funny, and he was a towering figure. It was a golden evening for me. Oscar told me he admired my work. Stoddart commissioned novels from us both, did you know that? On the same evening. Oscar wrote his Dorian Gray, and I wrote The Sign of the Four”

“And then,” added Bram, “he went to prison. And you to an audience with the queen. Oh, say, I’ve simply forgotten to ask-has your knighthood come through yet?”

“Look here, it’s not so simple as you make it seem, all right? It’s not as if they locked him up in jail over Dorian Gray, and it’s not as if The Sign of the Four were the proximate cause of this knighthood everyone says I should be expecting. There was a series of intermediate steps. We took two different paths, do you see?”

“Yes, Arthur. I do.”

The men sat in silence for long minutes as Bram puffed on his cigar and Arthur let his mind recede into the fantasia of recollection. With Oscar it was the dinners one remembered most. With some men it was the afternoons at sport or late nights before the brandy bottle. But Arthur would always remember Oscar at dinner. At the head of a long table, six guests laid out before him on either side of the centerpiece like wings. Every head turned to face him hungrily, waiting for the next jest, the next outrageous and delicious proclamation. Arthur would remember the words that Oscar spoke, but he would also remember the way that Oscar fed off the attention and the laughter. Oscar was merely witty oneon-one, but he was uproarious in a group of twelve. It was as if, for Oscar, if there were no audience, then it was not worth the effort to try.

“It’s getting dark,” said Bram suddenly.

Arthur had to admit that it was. Little remained of the sun’s light outside the windows. Bram stood and approached a small switch near the door. He flicked it upward, and the room exploded.

Or so it felt to Arthur, until his eyes adjusted to the searing glare. When the blinding whiteness had subsided and Arthur’s eyes began to perceive color again, he noticed that on the sconces of the walls beside him, and on the arms of the miniature chandelier above, were electric bulbs. The six-inch tubes of glass burned a light of such whiteness as Arthur had never before seen.

“Oh, have you not seen my lights yet?” said Bram. “I had these put in over the summer. You’ve seen the public ones they’re putting out on the streets, but these are smaller. For private use. Dreadfully expensive, I don’t mind telling you, but look at them! I feel like I’m blowing cigar smoke into the clouds of heaven itself!” To illustrate his point, Bram puffed a hearty cloud of smoke at one of the wall sconces. The smoke seemed to be incinerated by radiance.

Arthur blinked his eyes, trying to stamp out the red and orange spots he hallucinated before him. When he had done so and his vision was fully restored, he surveyed Bram’s drawing room again.

The colors were those of medieval pageantry. All red was pure red, and all blue was pure blue. The shadows of the chairs cut sharp black lines on the golden Persian rugs. All was clean, visible, and still. Arthur thought that the room used to look like a Michelangelo and now it more resembled a medieval panel work. The luscious and spooky graybrowns of gaslight chiaroscuro had been stripped clean off by the sharp razor of electricity.

“They are a marvel,” said Arthur. A twinge of hesitation remained in his throat.

“Quite,” said Bram. “And yet I hear it in your voice. Something bothers you about them.”

Arthur looked around and felt adrift in the nova glare of progress.

“I can’t explain it, precisely,” he said. “But they make me sad, somehow.”

“You feel it, too, then?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“It’s the end of an age,” said Bram. “And the beginning of a new one. The twentieth century. It sounds odd on the tongue, doesn’t it? The calendars have already changed. And now we’ve lost Oscar. Not even Victoria can last forever, though she’s certainly of a mind to try.”

“Hush! Don’t speak that way.”

“Oh, come now. Edward won’t be so bad. You wait and see.”

“Perhaps,” said Arthur, “what saddens me is not the passing of time but the curious sensation of being aware of it as it happens. We’re used to demarcating our histories in hindsight-we draw the lines afterward. It’s the scholars who separate one period from another. Did Constantine know that he was presiding over something more than the natural tumult of empire? Did Newton know that he’d arrived upon a wave of revolution, like Aphrodite on her clamshell? And moreover, did anyone else perceive the change in the air around them? Were they ‘self-aware,’ as we are?

“But you’re right, I think,” Arthur continued. “I don’t know how any man could feel his eyes burn in the electric light and not also feel the sudden palpability of history.”

Bram smiled. “The ‘palpability of history,’ ” he said, rolling it over his tongue. “I like that.” He paused, looking Arthur up and down curiously. “You’ve been writing again? At work on more stories?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, unsure of where Bram was headed with this line of inquiry.

“You always get a touch more poetic in conversation when you’ve just been writing. It’s something of which I’ve taken notice over the years. Quite charming, really.” Bram held his breath and scratched his beard. Arthur felt that Bram was preparing to broach a delicate subject. And when Bram next spoke, Arthur’s suspicions were confirmed.

“Holmes?”

“Oh, hell, not you, too!” said Arthur. “I get enough bullying about him from my publishers. No. I have not been writing about Sherlock Holmes.”

“As you say. I just had the thought…well, how shall I put this? There was no man who felt your ‘palpable history’ more than Sherlock Holmes.”

“I will not write more Holmes stories, do you understand? I would have thought I’d made that perfectly clear at this point.”

“I don’t care whether you do or not,” said Bram. “But you will, eventually. He’s yours, till death do you part. Did you really think he was dead and gone when you wrote ‘The Final Problem’? I don’t think you did. I think you always knew he’d be back. But whenever you take up your pen and continue, heed my advice. Don’t bring him here. Don’t bring Sherlock Holmes into the electric light. Leave him in the mysterious and romantic flicker of the gas lamp. He won’t stand next to this, do you see? The glare would melt him away. He was more the man of our time than Oscar was. Or than we were. Leave him where he belongs, in the last days of our bygone century. Because in a hundred years, no one will care about me. Or you. Or Oscar. We stopped caring about Oscar years ago, and we were his bloody friends. No, what they’ll remember are the stories. They’ll remember Holmes. And Watson. And Dorian Gray.”

“And your count? What was his name? From that little province…” Arthur trailed off. He searched his mind for the name of that backwater kingdom but couldn’t find it.

“Transylvania,” supplied Bram when it became clear that Arthur did not recall the name. “He was from Transylvania. No, they won’t remember him. He didn’t inspire the imagination of a people as did your Holmes. He was my great failure.” Bram laughed bitterly. “Count What’s-His-Name.”

“I’m sorry, Bram,” said Arthur. “I’m so very sorry. I know well how much of your own blood was in that novel. And I thought it was a grand thing, I truly did.” He paused. “Is that why Oscar’s death has you so battered up?”

“Yes, I suppose it is. We treated the man himself as scrap paper; to be used for a while and then discarded. But the stories we will treasure forever. At least Oscar will have his tales in posterity. What will I have?”

“ ‘The man is nothing. The work is everything.’ That’s what you’re getting at?”

“Yes.” Bram paused. “That’s Flaubert, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And we still remember.” Bram laughed bitterly again.

“My stories,” said Arthur. “The science of deduction. The reasoning detective. The solution delivered patly in a satisfying dénouement. They’re all horseshit.”

Bram smiled. “I know,” he said. “That’s why we need them.”

Arthur considered this. “I’ve moved on,” he offered after a long pause. “I’ve been working at realism. History.”

“Realism,” Bram repeated. “Realism, I think, is fleeting. It’s the romance that will live forever.”

“And what about me? Will my name live on?”

Bram’s face turned sour and grim. “I do not know, my friend. All I’ll say is this: The world does not need Arthur Conan Doyle. The world needs Sherlock Holmes.”

“No!” exclaimed Arthur quite suddenly. “No. I am better than he is, don’t you see? I will not be shamed by him. I will outlive him, and I will outshine him.”

“Arthur-”

“Wilde is dead and already forgotten, you say? We’re all bound for the grave and bitter obscurity? Damn it, no. I will not let Holmes win.”

“He doesn’t even exist!” pleaded Bram, but it was no use.

“And the killer of Emily Davison?” Arthur said. “He exists. And I’ll see him to his grave before I unearth that blasted Holmes from his. Holmes won’t save Emily Davison-I will.”

“Arthur,” said Bram quietly. “No one will save Emily Davison. She’s dead.”

Arthur paused, momentarily speechless, as he blinked under the electric lights.