The Revenant of Thraxton Hall

CHAPTER 2 THE MOST HATED MAN IN LONDON

As the hansom cab turned onto Strand Street, Conan Doyle noticed that a crowd thronged the pavement outside the offices of The Strand Magazine and spilled out onto the road. For the past four years, The Strand had enjoyed an arrangement as exclusive publisher of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and the Baker Street detective had boosted circulation so that queues formed outside newsstands whenever a new story was published. In turn, the stories had made a wealthy man of their author.

But now, as the cab drew up, Conan Doyle noticed with surprise that many in the crowd clutched crudely drawn signs and wore black armbands. He quickly surmised that some major figure in British public life had died and assumed the worst: the death of the queen or the queen’s consort — at the very least, the prime minister or a beloved national hero. On the last score, he was correct, albeit in a fashion he could not have foreseen.

He stepped down from the cab and handed up a coin. The driver snatched it and, impatient to be gone, lashed the horses’ ears most cruelly. The two-wheeler lurched away like a cheap piece of stage scenery, suddenly revealing Conan Doyle to his audience. For a moment, the two regarded one another. His eyes scanned the crudely scrawled signs: BRING BACK HOLMES and SAVE OUR HERO. It was a touching display of public sympathy mourning the loss of a beloved fictional hero, and the doctor’s eyes moistened. But then he noticed other signs that read: MURDERER! BLACKGUARD! and CONAN THE COWARD!

Mutual recognition happened at the same instant; the crowd roiled into a snake pit of hisses, boos, and angry, shaken fists.

Something arced high in the air — a hurled cabbage — and smacked Conan Doyle straight in the face, staggering him backward and toppling his hat. Stunned, he stooped to recover his topper as a second cabbage shattered greenly off his broad shoulder. He stood gaping in astonishment.

“Bloody swine!” shrieked a slatternly woman’s voice.

“Murderin’ Barsterd!” a coarse-bearded navvy brayed, and spat a gleaming oyster in his direction.

More invective followed, in an even more profane fashion. Worse yet, so did the rotted refuse of an entire barrow, flung by angry fists, all following a trajectory toward Conan Doyle’s large head.

He raised both arms in a gesture of appeasement and summoned his best public speaking voice to quell the near riot.

“Good people. If I might speak a few words—”

A hand grabbed him by the collar of his overcoat and hauled him away, just in time to avoid another volley.

The hand belonged to a young redheaded fellow with a wisp of post-pubescent whiskers prickling his chin. The man, a boy really, probably five years shy of his twenties, wore a broad, news runner’s cap pulled down over his large ears.

“Beggin’ your pardon, Mister Doyle,” he apologized as he struggled to drag the author’s muscular bulk toward the front doors of The Strand, “but Mister Smith is in a right tizzy to see you.” A shriveled tomato whizzed low overhead, narrowly missing both men. “But perhaps not as anxious as this bloody rabble!”

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.