Drury Lane’s Last Case

27 The 300-Year-Old Crime

“The first thing we want to settle,” said Inspector Thumm grimly, “is who you are.”

They were congregated about the Englishman’s bed the next morning in the Tarrytown hospital. A call from the House Physician had informed them that the patient was in good enough condition to talk; careful nourishment, sedatives, and a sound night’s sleep had worked wonders with him. He had been shaved, and there was a slight flush on his flat cheeks, and his eyes were remote and intelligent. They had entered the room to find the man propped in bed, a profusion of morning newspapers strewn on the coverlet talking amiably to Donoghue in the next bed.

The Englishman’s sandy brows lifted. “Was there any doubt? I’m afraid I don’t understand.” He looked keenly from one to another of them, as if weighing them in some secret balance of his own. The voice was weak, but had a familiar timbre. “I am Dr. Hamnet Sedlar.”

“Ah,” said Lane. “This will be excellent news for Choate.”

“Choate? Oh, yes, Dr. Choate! He must have been worried,” said the Englishman smoothly. “Horrible time! Your friend Donoghue here thought I was his quarry of the blue hat. Ha, ha! The resemblance is — was startling.” He sobered. “He was my twin brother, y’know.”

“Then you do know he’s dead?” cried Patience. Lane glanced once at the Inspector, and the Inspector grew very red.

“I’ve been besieged by reporters all morning. And then these newspapers— They told me everything. From the Medical Examiner’s description of the corpse, it must have been my brother William. He used the pseudonym Dr. Ales, y’know, in his professional writing.”

“Hmm,” said Thumm. “Look here, Dr. Sedlar. It looks very much as if this case is solved. But what the solution is I’m blamed if I know. We’ve learned, as we told you, some suspicious things about you — and now about your brother — and we want the truth. If your brother’s dead there’s no longer any reason to keep quiet.”

Dr. Sedlar sighed. “I suppose that’s so. Very well, I shall tell you everything.” He closed his eyes; his voice was very feeble. “You and the papers have made a great point about my untruth concerning the date of my arrival in this country. The fact is that I came here in secret before my announced arrival in an attempt to avert a dishonorable act. My brother William’s act.” He stopped; no one spoke. He opened his eyes. “There are too many people here,” he said abruptly.

“Oh, come now, Doctor,” said Rowe. “We’re all in this thing together. And as far as Donoghue is concerned—”

“I’m deef, dumb, an’ blind,” grinned the Irishman.

The story came out reluctantly. Some years before, when William Sedlar had been actively engaged in England as a representative of book collectors, he had been friendly with Sir John Humphrey-Bond, the famous British bibliophile. William had been instrumental in effecting the deal whereby Samuel Saxon had purchased from Sir John’s library one of the three existing copies of the 1599 Jaggard edition of The Passionate Pilgrim. Some months later William, who had access to Sir John’s enormous library, ran across an old manuscript — not in itself valuable and utterly unknown to the bibliophilic world — which stated that a personal letter written and signed in the hand of William Shakespeare and containing a strange secret had been in existence as late as 1758, the date of the manuscript William found. This Shakespearian letter went on the manuscript, because of its hideous secret, had been hidden in the back-cover binding of a 1599 edition of the Jaggard The Passionate Pilgrim. Excited by his discovery, William ascertained that Sir John had never read the manuscript and, his collector’s cupidity aroused, had purchased it from his patron without revealing its contents. He had taken Hamnet, then curator of the Kensington Museum, into his confidence and had shown him the manuscript. Hamnet had scoffed at it as an old wives’ tale. But William, drunk with the extraordinary historic, literary, and monetary value of this long-lost document the manuscript spoke of, had gone on the prowl — despite the fact that he realized that most of the first-edition Jaggards of The Passionate Pilgrim had disappeared in the course of three centuries and that only three were left. He satisfied himself after a three-year search that two of the copies — the second of which was in possession of Pierre Gréville, the French collector — did not contain the rumored holograph. Having to flee France with the gendarmerie at his heels, he embarked for the United States almost in despair, but savagely intent on examining the third and last copy, which ironically enough he himself had been instrumental in putting into the hands of Samuel Saxon. He had written his brother Hamnet secretly before leaving Bordeaux.

“He wrote me about his attack on Gréville,” said Dr. Sedlar faintly, “and I realized that his pursuit of the document had become an obsession with him. As luck would have it I had agreed to Mr. James Wyeth’s proposal to come to America only a short time before. I saw my opportunity to look William up and try to avert another crime, if I could. Consequently I caught an earlier boat and on my arrival in New York placed an advertisement in the personal columns of the newspapers. William got in touch with me readily enough, meeting me at the cheap hotel where I had taken temporary quarters under an assumed name. He told me he had rented a house in Westchester under his old alias of Dr. Ales; that he was on the track of the Saxon copy, but had had ill luck since the book among others had been left in Saxon’s will to the Britannic Museum and he had not been able to get hold of it. He told me also about having hired a common thief named Villa to break into the Saxon mansion and steal the volume; but Villa had bungled, stealing a worthless and palpable forgery, and William had returned it anonymously. He was in a fever of impatience; the museum, he told me, was closed for repairs; the Jaggard had been delivered among the others in the benefaction; he must get into the museum! I saw he was mad with cupidity and I tried to dissuade him; the situation was desperate; I myself was becoming curator of the museum. But William was adamant and our first conversation got nowhere; he went away.”

“It was you, I suppose,” said Lane slowly, “who visited your brother’s house in secret one night — the muffled visitor your brother’s man told us about?”

“Yes. But it did no good. I was beside myself with consternation and fear. Not a pleasant position for me, y’know.” The Englishman drew a deep breath. “When the Jaggard was stolen, I knew at once that William must have been the man in the blue hat. But I could not talk, obviously. William got in touch with me secretly that same night, telling me gleefully that beyond all hope he had actually discovered the document in the binding of the Saxon Jaggard and was sending the book itself back to the museum, having no further use for it. Because he was after all no petty thief, he had left his own copy of the 1606 Jaggard — I had not even dreamed of its existence and where he got it I do not know — in place of the stolen Jaggard as a salve to his own conscience and because, I suppose, he thought it would delay discovery of the theft. It superficially resembled the 1599.”

“But how about this business of being made prisoner?” growled Thumm. “Where does that come in?”

Dr. Sedlar bit his lip. “I’d never dreamed he would go to such rascally lengths, you know. He caught me quite off guard. My own brother!... On Friday last I received a note in the post at the Hotel Seneca, making a secret appointment near Tarrytown, not at his own house. He was very mysterious about it, and I was not suspicious because...” He stopped and his eyes clouded. “At any rate Saturday morning I went to the rendezvous from the museum, where I’d left Dr. Choate. It’s... it’s a little painful, gentlemen.”

“He attacked you?” said Bolling sharply.

“Yes.” The man’s lips trembled. “Virtually kidnapped me — his own brother! And he stuffed me, bound and gagged, into a filthy hole... You know the rest.”

“But why?” demanded Thumm. “I can’t see the sense in it.”

Sedlar shrugged his thin shoulders. “I suppose he was afraid I’d give him away. I had in desperation threatened to give him up to the police, y’know. I imagine he wanted me out of the way until he could slip out of the country with the document.”

“Your monocle was found in the Ales house after what we know now to have been a murder,” said Thumm sternly. “Explain that.”

“My monocle? Oh, yes.” He waved a weary hand. “The press did have something to say about that. I can’t explain it. William must have taken it from me when— He did say he was returning to the house to get the document, which he had hidden there; and then he meant to skip out. But I suppose he ran afoul of his murderer and in some way the monocle slipped out of his pocket and was crushed during the struggle. Unquestionably he was slain for possession of the document.”

“And it’s now in the hands of your brother’s murderer?”

“What else?”

There was a little silence. Donoghue had frankly gone to sleep, and his snores punctuated the silence like a rattle of musketry. Then Patience and Rowe looked at each other, and both rose and leaned over the bed on opposite sides.

“But the secret, Dr. Sedlar,” pleaded Rowe, his eyes feverish.

“You can’t just let it go at that!” cried Patience.

The man on the bed regarded them with a smile. “So you want to know, too?” he said softly. “Suppose I told you that the secret revolved about... the death of Shakespeare?”

“The death of Shakespeare!”

“Well, well?” said Rowe hoarsely.

“But how can a man write about his own death?” asked Patience.

“A very pertinent question,” chuckled the Englishman. He shifted suddenly in bed, his eyes flaming. “What did Shakespeare die of?”

“No one knows,” muttered Rowe. “But there’s been speculation and some attempt at scientific diagnosis. I remember reading an article in an old copy of the Lancet which ascribed Shakespeare’s death to a fantastic complication of causes — typhus, epilepsy, arterio-sclerosis, chronic alcoholism, Bright’s disease, locomotor ataxia, and the Lord knows what else. I think there were thirteen altogether.”

“Indeed?” murmured Dr. Sedlar. “How interesting. The point is that according to this old manuscript” — he paused — “Shakespeare was murdered.”

There was an appalled silence. The Englishman went on with a faint odd smile. “It seems that the letter was written by Shakespeare to a certain William Humphrey—”

“Humphrey?” whispered Rowe. “William Humphrey? The only Humphrey I’ve ever heard of in connection with Shakespeare was Ozias Humphrey, who was commissioned by Malone in 1783 to prepare a crayon drawing of the Chandos portrait. Ever hear of this Humphrey, Mr. Lane?”

“No.”

“It’s a name new to Shakespeariana,” said Dr. Sedlar. “The—”

“By George!” exclaimed Rowe, staring. “W.H.!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“W.H. The W.H. of the Sonnets!”

“There’s an inspiring thought. It’s possible; there never was a clear conclusion on that point. At any rate we know this: William Humphrey was a direct ancestor of Sir John Humphrey-Bond!”

“Explaining,” said Patience in an awed voice, “how the book with the letter in it came to be in possession of the Humphrey-Bond family.”

“Precisely. Evidently Humphrey was a close friend of the poet’s.”

Young Rowe sprang to the foot of the bed. “You’ve got to be clear about this thing,” he rasped. “What was the date of the letter? When was it sent?”

“April twenty-second, 1616.”

“God! The day before Shakespeare’s death! Did you — did you see this letter?”

“I’m sorry to say I did not. But my brother told me about it, unable to keep it to himself.” Sedlar sighed. “Strange, eh? In this letter Shakespeare wrote to his friend William Humphrey that he was ‘fast sinking,’ that he was in ‘sore bodily distress,’ and that he was convinced some one was slowly poisoning him. The next day — he died.”

“Oh, good Lord!” said Rowe again and again, and he fingered his necktie as if it choked him.

“Poisoned, hey?” said the Inspector, shaking his head. “Who the hell would want to poison the old boy?”

Patience said stiffly: “It looks horribly as if we’ll have to solve a three-hundred-year-old murder before...”

“Before what, Patience?” asked Lane in a curious voice.

She shivered a little, avoiding his eyes, and turned away.