Dust and Shadow

CHAPTER THIRTY The Gift

For much of that afternoon Holmes sat in his armchair, perfectly still save for the minuscule movements required to smoke his pipe. The rain cleared in the midmorning, the skies wiped clean of their mists while the mud in Baker Street below scattered from the wheels of the cabs and lorries.

At long last, as evening approached, the pageboy entered with a yellow slip on his salver. Glancing at Holmes, I could not tell whether he might, in his utter weariness, have fallen asleep. I shook his shoulder gently.

“Just read it to me, will you, Watson?”

I tore open the telegram. “‘I am sorry, Sherlock. It cannot be helped. You have full discretion. Godspeed, my dear boy. Mycroft.’”

Holmes remained silent for a moment, pressing at his shoulder absently. “Then that is final.”

“Holmes,” I asked somberly, as he unfurled himself from his chair and rang for his boots, “what does ‘full discretion’ mean?”

“I am afraid I have been requested to undertake a small service by the highest levels of government.”

“I see,” said I. “May I inquire whether the task they wish you to perform is a criminal one?”

Holmes looked startled but soon recovered. “You and I have several times apprehended a culprit only to discover that justice lay entirely upon the side of the lawbreaker. In those instances, we could do nothing more equitable than to let him go. We acted outside of the British courts. This is…similar.”

“So the word ‘discretion’ is used in place of ‘pardon,’” I affirmed.

“My dear Watson—”

“They no longer wish for us to arrest him.”

“No,” he said shortly, and then crossed to the desk in which our revolvers were stored and slipped his gun in his pocket. “My dear fellow, I cannot in any sort of conscience wish you to accompany me.”

“I see. It is possible that you are being selfless, and also possible that you are being merely solitary.”

“I must do what I must, but I refuse to ask the same of you.” He looked me in the face as he leaned back against the mantel. I waited quietly.

“They want me to kill him.”

I nodded in silent sympathy.

“And will you?”

“I haven’t the slightest notion,” he said softly. “Logic appears to have failed me. Among other failings.”

“Holmes, it isn’t remotely your fault,” I stated firmly. “But will you do what they’ve asked?”

“I suppose if we were to look up the dueling codes, the wretch has certainly given me ample cause. And yet, I can’t simply…My dear Watson, surely you’ve no wish to be associated with what is bound to be an altogether ungodly enterprise?”

Though I had never seen Sherlock Holmes so determined, I had also never seen him so at sea. For that reason among a great many others, I could not easily imagine abandoning him in his hour of need.

“I cannot in good faith remain behind,” I considered. “If the evening goes as powers beyond our control desire it to, one or more people will require medical attention before the night is out.”

Holmes smiled gravely and then shook me by the hand.

Squaring his shoulders, my friend strode to the door and tossed me my hat from its peg. “They’ve a valid position, you know. We cannot conceivably leave him to roam the streets, and so we shall at least deprive him of his liberty. Arm yourself as you were, but I do not think we need affect any disguise this evening. For an investigator, a charade is often of the greatest use, but for an assassin, it smacks of skulduggery. I cannot be expected to lose all my self-respect in a single day. I should never be able to take on another case.”

Of Holmes’s pursuit of the world-renowned killer known as Jack the Ripper, little remains to be told. And yet, as the circumstances were so very remarkable, and the outcome so dramatic, I must proceed in my own way. Holmes may decry colour and life in my tales all he likes, but when a winter’s evening prevents our embarkation from Baker Street and he has exhausted his agony columns, still he reads them. But I digress, as he has so often had occasion to remark. I shall do my best to keep to the point.

The cab deposited us at the corner of Thrawl Street, deep in the convoluted warren just south of the notorious Flower and Dean Street. Evening had deepened the skies above us to a hazy sapphire. We walked down a side passage into a small mews with bits of wastepaper dancing in the dark breezes.

“There—I believe that is the den in question.” The detective nodded at a sagging wooden doorframe; an adjacent window patched with greasy paper was illuminated from within by the light of a yellow lamp. “Are you ready, Doctor?”

Edging to the door, my friend placed his hand upon the latch. He threw it open, and we stepped into the room.

A very old woman sat wrapped in a shawl before the fire, the embers of which, though dying, still cast a considerable heat into the room. I feared briefly that we would cause her grave shock by bursting into the room with weapons drawn as they were, but a glance at her fixed, clouded gaze immediately informed me she was entirely blind.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “What are you doing here?”

“My name is Sherlock Holmes, ma’am,” my friend replied, casting his eyes about the room.

“I don’t know you. But of course, you must have business with my son. Come near the fire; it is wonderful.” The tiny room was so stifling as to be nearly suffocating. “I live upstairs, as a rule. There’s a girl who comes up with food. But the windows have all been breaking, you see, in the night.”

“Have they?” Holmes inquired.

“Yes. My son patched the one on this floor but said the upstairs would require more careful handling.”

“I hope no harm came of it.”

“Oh, no, I don’t imagine a little thing like that could hurt Edward.” She smiled. “Another man, perhaps, but my son is quite remarkable.”

“I have no doubt that is true. Does he happen to be at home, Mrs. Bennett?”

“He’s stepped out for a moment. But who is with you?”

“This is Dr. Watson. We are both very anxious to speak with your son.”

I looked around the room from where I stood by the door. There was a filthy stove with a few pots and pans lying atop it, an ancient sofa, and bookshelves filled with dusty tomes and several glass jars. Lying in a gap between volumes was an ancient, tailless cat whose eyes flicked from one to the other of us in limpid yellow pools.

“Bless you for looking for him here. He doesn’t live here, you know, not even after his father died. He lives in the City. But he has been staying in my rooms more often of late.”

Holmes also noted the shelving and approached it, leaving his revolver on the table. When he reached out a hand for the jar beside the cat, the creature screamed in a hoarse, pining tone and fled to the middle of the stairs.

“Never mind the Admiral,” the old woman said, laughing. “He ought not to be frightened of you. He is safe enough, after all.”

“Why do you say the cat is safe?” asked Holmes intently.

“Well, that is obvious, isn’t it? He hasn’t any tail.”

My friend methodically returned the jar to its space beside the imposing bound volumes while stating, “Your son is a scholar.” I could just make out the contours of what the glass vessel contained, and concluded that Leslie Tavistock’s horror had not been quite as unmanly as I had assumed.

“Are you gentlemen friends of Edward’s?”

“Our respective occupations have thrown us very much together in the past few weeks.”

“I see—I thought perhaps you knew him. My son is not a scholar. The books belonged to my late husband.”

“And his studies held no interest for Edward?”

“Just so. The two of them could not have been more different, if you wish to know the truth of it.”

“That is very interesting. I have always thought fathers and sons are often alike.”

I little knew why Holmes was so intrigued by the tiny crone’s conversation, but his soothing tones and the sweltering heat of the room were beginning to have a soporific effect on me.

“I have heard that said also. But not in this case. My husband was a scholar, as you said. That is one difference. He was physically very imposing, which is another. And also my husband had a very weak temperament.”

“In what way?”

“If you must know, he had no ability whatever to master himself. I suffered for his weaknesses, when he was still alive.”

“But Edward did not?”

“Oh, no,” she said proudly.

“Then he was away at school?”

“No indeed. He was here for the worst of it. But that was of no consequence. Edward cannot be hurt, you see.”

“I am not sure that I understand you, ma’am.”

“He is blessed that way. Oh, he would cry at first, when he was very, very young, but he soon acquired his gift of strength, and there was an end to his suffering. I prayed every day for him to be blessed with the gift, and finally my greatest desire was granted me. He was eight, I believe—a terrible day that had been, I remember. I think it was the day the Admiral lost the first bit of his tail. But Edward has the gift now, and he can never suffer again.

“I sometimes wish I had prayed so much for the Admiral,” she mused. “It would have spared him a great deal to have the gift too. But as I said, the dear creature needn’t worry now.”

She laughed contentedly at this and held her hands out toward the dying fire.

Her movement drew my friend’s attention to the scuttle, which was brimful with fuel. “Have you another coal hod, Mrs. Bennett?”

“No indeed. What would I want with another coal hod?”

“Did your son refill it for you before he left?”

“I don’t believe so. He’s lit quite a blaze for us, as you can tell. But if we need more coal, there’s a supply down in the basement. You just go through that trap under the staircase, you see.”

Holmes knelt down to touch the floor and then recoiled as if he had been burned.

“What has he done?” he cried. “Open the door, Watson, quickly!”

My friend lifted Mrs. Bennett from her chair, and the three of us flew outside under the chilling night sky. We had not gotten five strides from the chamber when a sound like the roar of a crashing wave over the side of a storm-tossed ship washed over us and I was thrown to the bitter ground.

It seemed that I could not move for several minutes, but I was in no position to judge time accurately. I know I heard my name spoken three times, each with increasing violence and urgency, but from very far away. Perhaps only seconds passed before I managed to sit up, but when I did so, I felt a sudden splintering pain at my side, and my eyes flew open with the shock of it.

When I looked around me, I faintly noted that the courtyard was flushed with a flickering light. I met the eyes of Holmes, who lay several feet from me and had not yet managed to raise himself from the ground. Mrs. Bennett lay sprawled on her back upon the stones and did not move.

“Are you all right, my friend?” Holmes breathed.

“I think so,” I returned. I began to crawl toward them. “Holmes, you are not hurt?”

“Nothing to signify,” said he, raising himself on his forearms, though I could see in the eerie light that his head bled in a slow trickle, and either he had touched it with his hand or that appendage was bleeding as well.

“What happened?”

“The basement was on fire. When the trapdoor disintegrated…”

“What the devil has he done, Holmes? He has destroyed his own refuge.”

“He has indeed,” my friend replied hollowly. “From which we can draw only one conclusion.”

An icy chill of despair engulfed me at the inevitable inference.

“He no longer has any use for it.”

Holmes’s lids descended hopelessly for a moment, and then he turned his attention to the lady. “Mrs. Bennett?” he said, touching her shoulder. Her glassy eyes were open, but she gave no sign. “Mrs. Bennett, can you hear me?”

She shuddered slightly. “Where are we?” she asked.

“There was an explosion. Can you move at all?”

“I do not like to try,” she murmured.

“Then do not attempt it.”

“I wonder if the girl is all right.”

“What girl?” my friend asked.

“Gently, Holmes,” I whispered. “She is quite mad, after all. We must not alarm her.”

“Can you tell me what girl you mean, Mrs. Bennett?”

“I can hardly say exactly,” she sighed. “My son had a friend. I don’t know what they were doing. There is little enough to see upstairs. He was going to show her the stars, perhaps, through the broken window. They would look different through a broken window.”

My friend staggered to his feet and made at once for the door, which I now saw had been blown partially off its hinges. The walls of the chamber within were painted with orange flame, and smoke poured from the now glassless front window.

“Holmes!” I shouted. I managed to stand, but only with a tremendous effort. My friend had tied his scarf over his face, but just as I reached him, he spun around to face me and arrested my movement with a forceful hand on my chest.

“Go to the window!” he cried. He turned and walked into the flames.

One petrifying glance at that room told me Sherlock Holmes was entirely correct. No matter what he found in the upstairs chamber, there could be no return the way he had come. I looked about the yard for a ladder or anything else of use, but saw nothing save a forlorn water barrel. I stumbled desperately toward the rotting object and dragged it with considerable difficulty to the alleyway on the other side of the house.

There, my prospects proved more promising. In addition to the barrel, there were several bales of hay at my disposal, and in a flash I recalled, as if from another decade, that Holmes had predicted a stable next to the site where one of the Ripper’s letters had been penned. I could see the window, entirely free of glass and billowing smoke, many feet above my head, and a water pipe running down the side of the building into a tall cistern perhaps a yard distant. Shoving two bales of hay together beside the tank and placing a third on top of them so as to form a makeshift staircase, I heaved the water barrel on top of all, ignoring as best I could the fiery pain in my side.

A moment later, my friend’s dark head appeared through the hole in the wall far above.

“The pipe, Holmes!” I cried. “It is the only way!”

He disappeared. Seconds passed, masquerading as hours. I was fighting desperately not to fall but could not understand why. I leaned against the opposite wall and somehow remained standing. If you remain standing, I thought madly, he will come out.

At last Holmes reappeared, with something tied around his neck. He leaned head and shoulders out the window and barely managed, with his arm fully extended, to reach the water pipe. Using it as an anchor to pull himself out, he swung himself over to it and, when nearing the cistern, jumped to the water barrel and the hay and then fell to the ground. I do not recall, in my entranced state, that I was at all surprised to see Miss Monk hanging limply from his shoulders.

I fumbled at the knot binding her hands and so disentangled them. They had been tied with Holmes’s scarf. When I lifted Miss Monk and laid her gently upon the ground, her head lolled backward. Her neck was entirely unmarked.

“Is she alive?” Holmes gasped raggedly.

At first, I could not tell, so shallow was her breath, but at last I identified a sluggish pulse.

“There is life in her still. She has been drugged. Holmes? Holmes, for heaven’s sake, lie back and breathe deeply. You’ve been poisoned by the smoke.”

He collapsed against the wall. “Surprising,” he managed through shuddering breaths. “I would have thought myself entirely inured to the substance.”

I laughed and felt an itching sensation at the back of my neck. I reached behind my head to touch it and my fingers returned clotted with blood.

“Holmes, we must get away from this place. The building is still burning.”

“Then let us—” Holmes began, and then his eyes fixed upon a point behind me and above our heads.

“You aren’t meant to be here yet,” said a soft voice.

I turned around, intending to rise, but managed only to fall to the stones beside my comrades.

“I doused the basement with kerosene. Then I brought Mother downstairs with an excuse about a broken window,” Edward Bennett continued thoughtfully, for I knew him from the funeral that seemed an age ago and in another country. “How could you have known the girl was missing so quickly? It ought to have been burned to the ground when you arrived.”

“Tavistock led us here,” said Holmes after a struggle for air.

“Oh, I see. I didn’t know who had broken the window. He has been of the greatest use to me. He is clever enough in his own way. Not as clever as you, of course, Mr. Holmes.”

“No, he isn’t.”

“You were the only real threat to my work, you know,” Bennett remarked. His face and figure were strikingly, disarmingly neutral. He had blond hair and queerly pensive blue eyes. Even with him standing before us, I could scarcely describe him to myself, though that may well have been the effect of the explosion upon my senses. “I was with you on the Baron Ramsden case, if you recall. The missing patch of grass. Gregson didn’t see it as we did. Of course, you lied to him. You lied to everyone. You think yourself the final seat of judgment, don’t you? Astonishing arrogance. I can’t abide arrogance. Admit that you lied.”

“I cannot think what you mean,” Holmes exhaled coldly. “Then again, the world is rather hazy just now.”

“That is a pity. I do not think I can allow you to remain in it much longer.”

“Your mother—”

“Oh, you got her out as well, did you?” Bennett’s face changed entirely as his mouth curved downward in a witheringly cruel contortion. The features twisted into the personification of hatred. I saw the letter writer staring back at us, the man who had written the words From hell. In an instant the look was gone. “You think of distracting me, but it won’t work, Mr. Holmes. You understand everything now.”

“I don’t,” Holmes coughed, retching slightly. “I never pretended to. I never understood any of it.”

“Come, now. You know far more than I ever intended you should.”

“I don’t know why you killed Martha Tabram.”

“Martha Tabram?” he repeated wonderingly. “Martha Tabram. I remember. The first girl. She had so much blood on her. She was crying out as she walked down the street. It reminded me of something.” He paused to consider. “They have all reminded me of something. I don’t know what it was. She was crying and I made her still. And the last girl, when you forced me off the streets—she was singing, and then all at once she was crying. I made her still too. Yes, I think that was part of it.

“Now, Mr. Holmes, I believe we should stop talking.”

It was becoming increasingly impossible to concentrate. My eyelids closed of their own accord. I forced them open again.

“You’re a fool,” Holmes murmured in a terrible, rasping voice. My friend still could not seem to breathe properly. “It will only be a moment before the police—”

“I am not a fool, and the police are a confused lot of imbeciles,” came the sharp reply. “I ought to know it. Running about like ants in their absurd circles. Take that message in the street I wrote, for example. I leave a note for them. And what do they do? They erase it.” He laughed pleasantly. “I thought they would. I couldn’t be sure until I had tried. I meant to write it in Dutfield’s Yard, next to the hall where all those Jews hold their meetings. That would have been something to see. But you arrived too soon that time as well.”

Bennett drew a knife from his coat. “I don’t like to finish it, Mr. Holmes, but I fear I must. I have to leave, you see. I do not believe I can stay in London any longer. But I promise not to hurt you. I never hurt any of them,” he whispered as he leaned down slowly toward us.

Two revolver shots went off. Bennett fell, his knife clattering beside him. It glinted in the light of the flames pouring out of the window above. I looked down at the gun in my hand and thought, It will have to be cleaned. Then I felt myself falling just as Bennett had, and the world grew swiftly dark.