Fic for blueonblue: The Tracing of Footsteps
TitleThe Tracing of Footsteps
Author tweedisgood
Recipient blueonblue
‘Verse ACD canon
Rated G
Word count 3287 words
Pairing Holmes and Watson friendship
Notes: with thanks to the patient and encouraging mazaher for beta reading and helpful suggestions. I must here admit that both the plants mentioned in this story are wholly made up. I plead a certain milk-drinking swamp adder in my defence.
Warning: Victorian period attitudes to race which are offensive.
“Here is my monograph upon the tracing of footsteps, with some remarks upon the uses of plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses.” The Sign of Four
“I came here to look at an abandoned railway, Chris. I’m not a ghost hunter.”
“Yeah, so you said. So ignore it. Probably some random old git from the village anyway. Another pint?”
“Wouldn’t say no. I’d rather not go out in that wind just yet. Except, unless they put Red Bull in his tea, how come he was there one second and gone the next?”
“Optical illusion. Shadows. Your brain in train-spotter gear.”
“So very funny, ha, ha. He looked like an extra in a costume drama, standing there under a brolly in a three-piece tweed suit. He was looking at a pocket watch on a chain. Even weirder, it looked like it was raining wherever he was, as if he had one of those cartoon clouds over his head.”
“That whole ‘ignoring it’ thing? Have to say, you’ve a funny way with it, mate.”
“Shut up and listen a minute. I went and looked up the history of this line at the library. In 1914, just after the start of The Great War, there was a massive crash further up the line. Coaches derailed left, right and centre, engine straight down the side of an embankment. Twenty people killed.”
“You’re telling me that the man you saw is waiting to meet someone who’s dead, are you?”
“Who was dead then. Now I suppose they both are.”
“And I suppose you’re cracked. What is the line anyway?”
“London Victoria to Newhaven loop line. Closed under Beeching in ’64. The platform’s still here and the station’s a warehouse. Track all taken up, of course, they re-used the iron. The station used to serve the village of Fulworth - just up the road. It’s pretty much all holiday homes and weekend cottages now. Wall-to-wall BMWs and Land Cruisers. No-one takes the train anymore, sod the environment.”
“Yeah, yeah, Pat Devine, eco-warrior. Carbon emissions, hole in the ozone, heard it - hang on, Fulworth?”
********************************
“A ghost, Mr Backhouse?”
Sherlock Holmes could not have raised his eyebrows any further even with the aid of a block and tackle. He did not need to deliver a lecture on the subject in words; he scanned the room as if he might just as well expect the Persian rug to fly, or my medical bag to start dancing a jig.
“Mr Holmes, I’m no more a believer in the spirit world than you are,” replied our client. “I should not have come to you otherwise. Your reputation is for finding fact beneath fancy, is it not?”
“A decent enough summary. You must pardon me, but have you consulted a doctor?”
A shadow crossed Backhouse’s face - half-embarrassment, half-indignation - but he nodded.
“I was forced to consider the possibility of nervous disease, yes. I was examined by Sir Kingsley Parsons,” - here I, for whom Sir Kingsley had the stature of a minor deity, confess I gaped - “and he pronounced there to be no taint of sickness. Indeed he gave as his opinion that I was quite the most intellectually intact individual he had seen in a twelvemonth.”
Holmes pursed his lips but said nothing. Our client noticed.
“And yet I mustbe mad to see these things. Yes, I can well see how it looks. Unless you, Mr Holmes, and you, Doctor Watson, can find another explanation, I know at any rate that I cannot continue simply to bear the visions. My health will not stand it.”
“Describe again what you believe you see. Precisely, to the finest detail.”
“It is never very detailed, that is the trouble. Only a black shadow following me, visible from the corner of my eye and vanishing when I turn to look directly. It has the shape of a man but no detail, no costume, no voice, no face.”
“On what days, at what times, does it manifest?”
“That’s almost the worst of it, there is no pattern. I can live for days free of it, I start to think all will now be well, then suddenly there it is again. It has been like this for six months. I have explained all this to Sir Kingsley. He suggested indigestion.”
Holmes chuckled. “The weakness of the specialist, however eminent. Have you any notion what the shadow might be?”
Backhouse shifted uneasily in his chair and glanced once in my direction. Holmes noticed. He reached for his briar pipe and began to fill it, carelessly, with shag.
“Come, Mr Backhouse, you had better be frank with me. Your shame, if you have any, will only appear in print after a decent interval and so changed as to detail that I doubt even Sir Kingsley, should he stoop to reading popular fiction, would recognise your case.”
I reined myself in. My ‘popular fiction’ indirectly paid for Holmes’ prodigious tobacco bills.
“Very well. I have spent time in the colonies; in Ceylon, to be exact. Near the end of my time there I came into the possession of a fine ruby.”
“’Came into the possession’? An odd choice of words. Stolen?”
“Certainly not! But I had a rival, an old nabob of those parts, pretty much on his last legs, who thought the stone his merely because it had been found on his property by one of his servants. I paid a fair price to the finder and that ought to have been the end of it, but no.” Backhouse began to warm to his theme. “He came up with some nonsense about his ancestral rights, rubies being the blood of the land, superstitious rubbish the lot of it. And when I refused even to sell it to him - for my own blood was powerfully up, and I don’t take kindly to being spoken to like a knave by some gaudy mountebank - he had the nerve to curse me! To say his forefathers would have their revenge on me and that in death he himself would hunt me down to the ends of the earth. Outrageous.”
He spread his hands in appeal, for surely we were reasonable men and we would take his side.
“You are convinced you acted rightly,” remarked Holmes, in a tone which efficiently conveyed the opposite. Backhouse scowled.
“We must all live under the law, Mr Holmes. You, of all people…”
He, of all people, smirked.
“Hum. The law. Well, leaving that aside, what, precisely, has this to do with your mysterious shadow?”
“I can only think he has someone in his pay who followed me to England, for the sole purpose of persecuting me. Resentment can run deep with natives, you see - don’t know the meaning of being bested in a fair contest; and it was fair, no doubt about it.”
“This ruby is of great value?”
“Oh, at least ten times what it cost me. I intend it to be a present for the future Mrs Backhouse.”
“Our congratulations.”
“No, I mean to say… when I am fortunate enough to secure a wife.”
Not all the treasures of the Indies would have induced me to take him, had I possessed the necessary qualifications. Holmes likewise was less interested in our client’s peace of mind than in his own - a peace fought for and won with every puzzle solved. Once Backhouse had left, he turned to me with a cool:
“One might almost wish he did have a vengeful spirit at his heels, Watson. Nevertheless, it is to science we must turn, not superstition. Off to the shipping registers with us in the morning: at the very least we will see if he may be pursued by a living man. I daresay few enough Ceylonese make their way to London month by month for us to be able to come up with a few names to be going on with.”
In the event, there were more than he expected, and the months between Backhouse arriving home and the start of his followings threw up such a crowd of possible suspects, most of whom would be nearly impossible to trace, that Holmes descended into a blue cloud of depression and tobacco smoke for half a day.
In vain I tried to distract him with the newspapers - there had been a particularly intricate fraud perpetrated at the Eastern Counties Bank - until I began to skip over the general news.
“Crowds have gathered to witness the first ever flowering of the Himalayan Strap Lily, first acquired by the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens thirty years ago. Its scent, supposed to be detectable by pollinating insects up to ten miles away…”
Holmes jumped from his chair, sending a teacup flying. Just as well I once kept wicket for the school cricket eleven.
“Backhouse’s address. Do you have it?”
Sandwiched between a bill for microscope slides and a dog-eared copy of the Police Gazette was the letter our client had sent asking for Holmes’ services, from ‘Harper Lodge, Wellesley Road, Gunnersbury’.
A flurry of leaps, stretches, crouches, frustrated tossing away of various items and triumphant retrieval of others followed. At last Holmes had in his hands the latest edition of Bartholomew’s Handy Reference Atlas of the suburbs, a ruler and a pocket compass. He stretched himself out full- length on the rug in front of the book and set to measuring and muttering.
“Fetch me the bottle-green book of poisons, would you, Watson?” he said, waving a long hand in the general direction of his bookshelf. He had so many volumes on the subject, not counting those which he had written himself, that we were obliged to colour-code them for ease of reference. A minute’s investigation into its mysteries and he sprang to his feet, stabbing with a bony forefinger at the page and thrusting the book in my direction.
“Ah-ha! Something in the attic, my dear Watson, something in the attic!”
“I beg your pardon?”
He shook his head in mute resignation. “Sometimes, I wonder if you truly attend to a word I say. In the attic which is my brain are stored innumerable trifles, each one an essential fact pertaining to crime, its commission and solution. There exists a flower whose pollen has startling effects on the consciousness of man. In concentrated form it produces hallucinations, convulsions and death, and can be used as a secret poison administered through brushing or painting on the skin. Distributed in the air, it has the power to conjure visions in the mind of a thoroughly disagreeable kind - in particular, the creeping sensation of being followed. But here is its chief disadvantage, to the casual English poisoner at any rate: it takes several exposures to begin to take effect, and it is rare. Furthermore, it must be given fresh from the plant, and its provenance…”
“Ceylon!” I cried.
“Quite so.”
At once I saw that this did not in fact put us any nearer solving the case.
“If the nabob did manage to torment him in this way, he would still have to send an accomplice. How would he ensure his man had fresh pollen to treat him twice? And how will we prove it?”
Sherlock Holmes rubbed his hands together and laughed. It was not a merry laugh, but there was delight and satisfaction in it, satisfaction at what seemed coincidence but was really natural justice, satisfaction at a piquant solution to a commonplace case, and above all the satisfaction of being one step ahead of everyone else on the planet.
“The prevailing wind is the minister of fate in this instance, not a swarthy servant from the East. Consider Gunnersbury. It lies in relation to Kew Gardens exactly in a position to catch the south westerly wind which so often brings the smuts of New Street chimneys onto Mrs Hudson’s washing line. Kew Gardens contains not only a specimen of the Himalayan Strap Lily but also of Asmodeus somniatiferus, more prosaically known as the Spotted Mossflower. The keepers have taken care to site it well out of reach of the public, and they tend it wearing face masks and stout gloves which are washed after each contact. What they cannot prevent is its general dissemination in the atmosphere, and they can only put up a notice and hope that regular visitors to the gardens bear it in mind, should they have discomfiting dreams. Backhouse, of course, has the misfortune to have been exposed many times already, whilst still in Ceylon. Every time the wind blows, he gets a whiff of Empire and a twinge of guilt manifested as a black shadow in his daily life. It remains to be seen if, when this is all explained to him, he chooses to mend his ways.”
Henry Backhouse paid Holmes’ fee. That was all the reward he had of it, for once having heard how he was only the victim of nature’s whims, Backhouse showed no interest in exploring the moral dimension, but resolved only to take a lease of a house in Bromley which had caught his eye.
“I should be safe enough there. Drat Ceylon. Give me good, old England any day! No idle nonsense about ancestors and the unconscious and all that claptrap.”
And with that, he was gone.
“Just as well he has never met your esteemed literary agent, Watson,” remarked Holmes over supper afterwards. “He’d soon have found himself up to his neck in ectoplasm and old maids.”
I felt bound to defend Doyle. He had some queer ideas, to be sure, but he was fundamentally a good sort who had put up with a hundred such barbs from my friend with nothing but a wry smile and a look to me that said No need to exaggerate him in the stories, doctor. He’s quite enough in the flesh.
“You are not such an iron materialist as all that, Holmes. Be honest. Roses and Reichenbach - you were happy enough to talk about a higher power then.”
“Hardly the same thing. You and I are not so weak minded, I think, as to believe we can commune with spirits. Have you ever seen a ghost?”
*************************************************
“Fulworth? ‘The Lion’s Mane’? The retirement cottage of Sherlock Holmes?”
“Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character, Chris. How can I have seen his ghost?”
“Bear with me. You know how legends start - a story to explain some coincidence, or some new way of doing things that’s caught on. If it’s a good enough story, people treat that story as real, then it kind of starts to get a life of its own, and it’s as if it had really happened, because the shape around it that forms in people’s minds, in the world, is the same as if it had been real?”
“Honestly, no, I don’t know. Facts are real and fiction isn’t. Simple.”
“Anything but. People have been writing to Sherlock Holmes for years, they even contacted Arthur Conan Doyle while he was alive, asking if Mr Holmes could take on cases or needed a housekeeper. So a manifestation could be as much about what you, or your subconscious, expected to see.”
“How come he wasn’t wearing the deerstalker, then?”
“Because maybe sometimes you listen to me, and you know that’s just the films being lazy.”
“All right, humouring you, even though you’re obviously off your trolley. Who’s he waiting for?”
“Come on. Who do you think?”
“Let me get this straight. I saw the ghost of Sherlock Holmes, who by the way never existed, waiting for Doctor John Watson, also entirely fictional, to arrive on a train that, in real life, derailed before it reached Fulworth, killing Doctor Watson, who could never have been on it in the first place, on account of not being real, as previously mentioned?”
“Um, yeah?”
“Yeahhhh...no. Absolutely not. Utter bollocks. I mean maybe, just maybe, I’d buy an impression of great grief, or unfinished business, somehow left in the air on a particular spot where a real life tragedy happened. But your idea? See above. Not real. Never were.”
“Please yourself. It’s just a theory.”
****************************************
Outside our rooms, the ring of horseshoes on the metalled surface of Baker Street drummed out the refrain: this world is all there is . I shrugged, kept silent, and allowed the conversation to pass on to other things. I had no wish for a razored dissection of my ‘weak mind’, some attempt to rationalise my experience, to make it fit the world according to Sherlock Holmes. Still I knew: there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in his philosophy.
For there had been mornings after Mary’s death when I heard her voice in the next room, singing a popular song from the first year of our marriage; when I caught the swish of her skirts out of the corner of my eye as I came into our parlour. I thought of her haunting me as a reproach, for not seeing the first signs of the illness that killed her, for leaving her side so often to run off with Holmes, for not giving her children, for a life cut short. A life I fought to save as doctor and spouse, but failed.
This is what ghosts are, we are told. Spirits with grievances, disappointments - with unfinished business, suffering un-righted wrongs. Shades whose story is half-written, who wait for a resolution, the happy ending they can never have.
I was a fool to think I could hide it. No sooner had we exhausted the weather, the situation in South Africa and the cases currently being heard at the Old Bailey, than he fixed his gimlet eye on me and demanded:
“Come on, then, Watson. Let’s have your ghost story.”
He was kinder than I had feared, but still to him it was all in my mind. My guilt, not her shade. My regret, not hers. My loss. My longing. My...affection. He found it hard to say the word. My love.
“Or perhaps the wind was merely blowing in the right direction. You know, my dear Watson: Kensington too, is north-east of Kew.”
I forgave him. He was a man, after all, who had never loved.
***********************************************
Late. The damned train was over an hour late. Troop trains taking precedence, of course. And it had started to rain again. The tall man consulted his pocket watch. He stood alone on the platform, save for a bustling porter arranging and rearranging the three luggage trolleys which were all that the little station at Fulworth could muster.
The shrill summons of a telephone bell sent the porter scurrying to the ticket office from which he performed his other role, as purveyor of the right to travel on the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. He stayed there a long time: so long, that the world’s only consulting detective (retired) came to see what the matter was.
The little man sat before the silent machine, holding himself perfectly, carefully still, his face the colour of bone ash. It would be no use demanding anything of him. Instead, putting together the pieces - No! - in the rational mind, a picture formed. An accident, further up the line. A terrible accident. Many dead. Watson….
A hand on his shoulder, a familiar voice, drew from Sherlock Holmes a cry that to his dying day - which, you will be happy to know, had many years yet to arrive - he would deny having uttered.
“Holmes. What’s up? I missed my train, came down in the car. Sorry I’m late. Didn’t you hear the horn? Good Lord, has someone died?”
He would deny, too, the flood of relief, the tremor in every limb as he got to his feet and had to sit down again.
On the platform, a shadow wavered, set and printed itself on the air for all time. Waiting, impatient, unknowing, for joy.
Author tweedisgood
Recipient blueonblue
‘Verse ACD canon
Rated G
Word count 3287 words
Pairing Holmes and Watson friendship
Notes: with thanks to the patient and encouraging mazaher for beta reading and helpful suggestions. I must here admit that both the plants mentioned in this story are wholly made up. I plead a certain milk-drinking swamp adder in my defence.
Warning: Victorian period attitudes to race which are offensive.
“Here is my monograph upon the tracing of footsteps, with some remarks upon the uses of plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses.” The Sign of Four
“I came here to look at an abandoned railway, Chris. I’m not a ghost hunter.”
“Yeah, so you said. So ignore it. Probably some random old git from the village anyway. Another pint?”
“Wouldn’t say no. I’d rather not go out in that wind just yet. Except, unless they put Red Bull in his tea, how come he was there one second and gone the next?”
“Optical illusion. Shadows. Your brain in train-spotter gear.”
“So very funny, ha, ha. He looked like an extra in a costume drama, standing there under a brolly in a three-piece tweed suit. He was looking at a pocket watch on a chain. Even weirder, it looked like it was raining wherever he was, as if he had one of those cartoon clouds over his head.”
“That whole ‘ignoring it’ thing? Have to say, you’ve a funny way with it, mate.”
“Shut up and listen a minute. I went and looked up the history of this line at the library. In 1914, just after the start of The Great War, there was a massive crash further up the line. Coaches derailed left, right and centre, engine straight down the side of an embankment. Twenty people killed.”
“You’re telling me that the man you saw is waiting to meet someone who’s dead, are you?”
“Who was dead then. Now I suppose they both are.”
“And I suppose you’re cracked. What is the line anyway?”
“London Victoria to Newhaven loop line. Closed under Beeching in ’64. The platform’s still here and the station’s a warehouse. Track all taken up, of course, they re-used the iron. The station used to serve the village of Fulworth - just up the road. It’s pretty much all holiday homes and weekend cottages now. Wall-to-wall BMWs and Land Cruisers. No-one takes the train anymore, sod the environment.”
“Yeah, yeah, Pat Devine, eco-warrior. Carbon emissions, hole in the ozone, heard it - hang on, Fulworth?”
********************************
“A ghost, Mr Backhouse?”
Sherlock Holmes could not have raised his eyebrows any further even with the aid of a block and tackle. He did not need to deliver a lecture on the subject in words; he scanned the room as if he might just as well expect the Persian rug to fly, or my medical bag to start dancing a jig.
“Mr Holmes, I’m no more a believer in the spirit world than you are,” replied our client. “I should not have come to you otherwise. Your reputation is for finding fact beneath fancy, is it not?”
“A decent enough summary. You must pardon me, but have you consulted a doctor?”
A shadow crossed Backhouse’s face - half-embarrassment, half-indignation - but he nodded.
“I was forced to consider the possibility of nervous disease, yes. I was examined by Sir Kingsley Parsons,” - here I, for whom Sir Kingsley had the stature of a minor deity, confess I gaped - “and he pronounced there to be no taint of sickness. Indeed he gave as his opinion that I was quite the most intellectually intact individual he had seen in a twelvemonth.”
Holmes pursed his lips but said nothing. Our client noticed.
“And yet I mustbe mad to see these things. Yes, I can well see how it looks. Unless you, Mr Holmes, and you, Doctor Watson, can find another explanation, I know at any rate that I cannot continue simply to bear the visions. My health will not stand it.”
“Describe again what you believe you see. Precisely, to the finest detail.”
“It is never very detailed, that is the trouble. Only a black shadow following me, visible from the corner of my eye and vanishing when I turn to look directly. It has the shape of a man but no detail, no costume, no voice, no face.”
“On what days, at what times, does it manifest?”
“That’s almost the worst of it, there is no pattern. I can live for days free of it, I start to think all will now be well, then suddenly there it is again. It has been like this for six months. I have explained all this to Sir Kingsley. He suggested indigestion.”
Holmes chuckled. “The weakness of the specialist, however eminent. Have you any notion what the shadow might be?”
Backhouse shifted uneasily in his chair and glanced once in my direction. Holmes noticed. He reached for his briar pipe and began to fill it, carelessly, with shag.
“Come, Mr Backhouse, you had better be frank with me. Your shame, if you have any, will only appear in print after a decent interval and so changed as to detail that I doubt even Sir Kingsley, should he stoop to reading popular fiction, would recognise your case.”
I reined myself in. My ‘popular fiction’ indirectly paid for Holmes’ prodigious tobacco bills.
“Very well. I have spent time in the colonies; in Ceylon, to be exact. Near the end of my time there I came into the possession of a fine ruby.”
“’Came into the possession’? An odd choice of words. Stolen?”
“Certainly not! But I had a rival, an old nabob of those parts, pretty much on his last legs, who thought the stone his merely because it had been found on his property by one of his servants. I paid a fair price to the finder and that ought to have been the end of it, but no.” Backhouse began to warm to his theme. “He came up with some nonsense about his ancestral rights, rubies being the blood of the land, superstitious rubbish the lot of it. And when I refused even to sell it to him - for my own blood was powerfully up, and I don’t take kindly to being spoken to like a knave by some gaudy mountebank - he had the nerve to curse me! To say his forefathers would have their revenge on me and that in death he himself would hunt me down to the ends of the earth. Outrageous.”
He spread his hands in appeal, for surely we were reasonable men and we would take his side.
“You are convinced you acted rightly,” remarked Holmes, in a tone which efficiently conveyed the opposite. Backhouse scowled.
“We must all live under the law, Mr Holmes. You, of all people…”
He, of all people, smirked.
“Hum. The law. Well, leaving that aside, what, precisely, has this to do with your mysterious shadow?”
“I can only think he has someone in his pay who followed me to England, for the sole purpose of persecuting me. Resentment can run deep with natives, you see - don’t know the meaning of being bested in a fair contest; and it was fair, no doubt about it.”
“This ruby is of great value?”
“Oh, at least ten times what it cost me. I intend it to be a present for the future Mrs Backhouse.”
“Our congratulations.”
“No, I mean to say… when I am fortunate enough to secure a wife.”
Not all the treasures of the Indies would have induced me to take him, had I possessed the necessary qualifications. Holmes likewise was less interested in our client’s peace of mind than in his own - a peace fought for and won with every puzzle solved. Once Backhouse had left, he turned to me with a cool:
“One might almost wish he did have a vengeful spirit at his heels, Watson. Nevertheless, it is to science we must turn, not superstition. Off to the shipping registers with us in the morning: at the very least we will see if he may be pursued by a living man. I daresay few enough Ceylonese make their way to London month by month for us to be able to come up with a few names to be going on with.”
In the event, there were more than he expected, and the months between Backhouse arriving home and the start of his followings threw up such a crowd of possible suspects, most of whom would be nearly impossible to trace, that Holmes descended into a blue cloud of depression and tobacco smoke for half a day.
In vain I tried to distract him with the newspapers - there had been a particularly intricate fraud perpetrated at the Eastern Counties Bank - until I began to skip over the general news.
“Crowds have gathered to witness the first ever flowering of the Himalayan Strap Lily, first acquired by the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens thirty years ago. Its scent, supposed to be detectable by pollinating insects up to ten miles away…”
Holmes jumped from his chair, sending a teacup flying. Just as well I once kept wicket for the school cricket eleven.
“Backhouse’s address. Do you have it?”
Sandwiched between a bill for microscope slides and a dog-eared copy of the Police Gazette was the letter our client had sent asking for Holmes’ services, from ‘Harper Lodge, Wellesley Road, Gunnersbury’.
A flurry of leaps, stretches, crouches, frustrated tossing away of various items and triumphant retrieval of others followed. At last Holmes had in his hands the latest edition of Bartholomew’s Handy Reference Atlas of the suburbs, a ruler and a pocket compass. He stretched himself out full- length on the rug in front of the book and set to measuring and muttering.
“Fetch me the bottle-green book of poisons, would you, Watson?” he said, waving a long hand in the general direction of his bookshelf. He had so many volumes on the subject, not counting those which he had written himself, that we were obliged to colour-code them for ease of reference. A minute’s investigation into its mysteries and he sprang to his feet, stabbing with a bony forefinger at the page and thrusting the book in my direction.
“Ah-ha! Something in the attic, my dear Watson, something in the attic!”
“I beg your pardon?”
He shook his head in mute resignation. “Sometimes, I wonder if you truly attend to a word I say. In the attic which is my brain are stored innumerable trifles, each one an essential fact pertaining to crime, its commission and solution. There exists a flower whose pollen has startling effects on the consciousness of man. In concentrated form it produces hallucinations, convulsions and death, and can be used as a secret poison administered through brushing or painting on the skin. Distributed in the air, it has the power to conjure visions in the mind of a thoroughly disagreeable kind - in particular, the creeping sensation of being followed. But here is its chief disadvantage, to the casual English poisoner at any rate: it takes several exposures to begin to take effect, and it is rare. Furthermore, it must be given fresh from the plant, and its provenance…”
“Ceylon!” I cried.
“Quite so.”
At once I saw that this did not in fact put us any nearer solving the case.
“If the nabob did manage to torment him in this way, he would still have to send an accomplice. How would he ensure his man had fresh pollen to treat him twice? And how will we prove it?”
Sherlock Holmes rubbed his hands together and laughed. It was not a merry laugh, but there was delight and satisfaction in it, satisfaction at what seemed coincidence but was really natural justice, satisfaction at a piquant solution to a commonplace case, and above all the satisfaction of being one step ahead of everyone else on the planet.
“The prevailing wind is the minister of fate in this instance, not a swarthy servant from the East. Consider Gunnersbury. It lies in relation to Kew Gardens exactly in a position to catch the south westerly wind which so often brings the smuts of New Street chimneys onto Mrs Hudson’s washing line. Kew Gardens contains not only a specimen of the Himalayan Strap Lily but also of Asmodeus somniatiferus, more prosaically known as the Spotted Mossflower. The keepers have taken care to site it well out of reach of the public, and they tend it wearing face masks and stout gloves which are washed after each contact. What they cannot prevent is its general dissemination in the atmosphere, and they can only put up a notice and hope that regular visitors to the gardens bear it in mind, should they have discomfiting dreams. Backhouse, of course, has the misfortune to have been exposed many times already, whilst still in Ceylon. Every time the wind blows, he gets a whiff of Empire and a twinge of guilt manifested as a black shadow in his daily life. It remains to be seen if, when this is all explained to him, he chooses to mend his ways.”
Henry Backhouse paid Holmes’ fee. That was all the reward he had of it, for once having heard how he was only the victim of nature’s whims, Backhouse showed no interest in exploring the moral dimension, but resolved only to take a lease of a house in Bromley which had caught his eye.
“I should be safe enough there. Drat Ceylon. Give me good, old England any day! No idle nonsense about ancestors and the unconscious and all that claptrap.”
And with that, he was gone.
“Just as well he has never met your esteemed literary agent, Watson,” remarked Holmes over supper afterwards. “He’d soon have found himself up to his neck in ectoplasm and old maids.”
I felt bound to defend Doyle. He had some queer ideas, to be sure, but he was fundamentally a good sort who had put up with a hundred such barbs from my friend with nothing but a wry smile and a look to me that said No need to exaggerate him in the stories, doctor. He’s quite enough in the flesh.
“You are not such an iron materialist as all that, Holmes. Be honest. Roses and Reichenbach - you were happy enough to talk about a higher power then.”
“Hardly the same thing. You and I are not so weak minded, I think, as to believe we can commune with spirits. Have you ever seen a ghost?”
*************************************************
“Fulworth? ‘The Lion’s Mane’? The retirement cottage of Sherlock Holmes?”
“Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character, Chris. How can I have seen his ghost?”
“Bear with me. You know how legends start - a story to explain some coincidence, or some new way of doing things that’s caught on. If it’s a good enough story, people treat that story as real, then it kind of starts to get a life of its own, and it’s as if it had really happened, because the shape around it that forms in people’s minds, in the world, is the same as if it had been real?”
“Honestly, no, I don’t know. Facts are real and fiction isn’t. Simple.”
“Anything but. People have been writing to Sherlock Holmes for years, they even contacted Arthur Conan Doyle while he was alive, asking if Mr Holmes could take on cases or needed a housekeeper. So a manifestation could be as much about what you, or your subconscious, expected to see.”
“How come he wasn’t wearing the deerstalker, then?”
“Because maybe sometimes you listen to me, and you know that’s just the films being lazy.”
“All right, humouring you, even though you’re obviously off your trolley. Who’s he waiting for?”
“Come on. Who do you think?”
“Let me get this straight. I saw the ghost of Sherlock Holmes, who by the way never existed, waiting for Doctor John Watson, also entirely fictional, to arrive on a train that, in real life, derailed before it reached Fulworth, killing Doctor Watson, who could never have been on it in the first place, on account of not being real, as previously mentioned?”
“Um, yeah?”
“Yeahhhh...no. Absolutely not. Utter bollocks. I mean maybe, just maybe, I’d buy an impression of great grief, or unfinished business, somehow left in the air on a particular spot where a real life tragedy happened. But your idea? See above. Not real. Never were.”
“Please yourself. It’s just a theory.”
****************************************
Outside our rooms, the ring of horseshoes on the metalled surface of Baker Street drummed out the refrain: this world is all there is . I shrugged, kept silent, and allowed the conversation to pass on to other things. I had no wish for a razored dissection of my ‘weak mind’, some attempt to rationalise my experience, to make it fit the world according to Sherlock Holmes. Still I knew: there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in his philosophy.
For there had been mornings after Mary’s death when I heard her voice in the next room, singing a popular song from the first year of our marriage; when I caught the swish of her skirts out of the corner of my eye as I came into our parlour. I thought of her haunting me as a reproach, for not seeing the first signs of the illness that killed her, for leaving her side so often to run off with Holmes, for not giving her children, for a life cut short. A life I fought to save as doctor and spouse, but failed.
This is what ghosts are, we are told. Spirits with grievances, disappointments - with unfinished business, suffering un-righted wrongs. Shades whose story is half-written, who wait for a resolution, the happy ending they can never have.
I was a fool to think I could hide it. No sooner had we exhausted the weather, the situation in South Africa and the cases currently being heard at the Old Bailey, than he fixed his gimlet eye on me and demanded:
“Come on, then, Watson. Let’s have your ghost story.”
He was kinder than I had feared, but still to him it was all in my mind. My guilt, not her shade. My regret, not hers. My loss. My longing. My...affection. He found it hard to say the word. My love.
“Or perhaps the wind was merely blowing in the right direction. You know, my dear Watson: Kensington too, is north-east of Kew.”
I forgave him. He was a man, after all, who had never loved.
***********************************************
Late. The damned train was over an hour late. Troop trains taking precedence, of course. And it had started to rain again. The tall man consulted his pocket watch. He stood alone on the platform, save for a bustling porter arranging and rearranging the three luggage trolleys which were all that the little station at Fulworth could muster.
The shrill summons of a telephone bell sent the porter scurrying to the ticket office from which he performed his other role, as purveyor of the right to travel on the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. He stayed there a long time: so long, that the world’s only consulting detective (retired) came to see what the matter was.
The little man sat before the silent machine, holding himself perfectly, carefully still, his face the colour of bone ash. It would be no use demanding anything of him. Instead, putting together the pieces - No! - in the rational mind, a picture formed. An accident, further up the line. A terrible accident. Many dead. Watson….
A hand on his shoulder, a familiar voice, drew from Sherlock Holmes a cry that to his dying day - which, you will be happy to know, had many years yet to arrive - he would deny having uttered.
“Holmes. What’s up? I missed my train, came down in the car. Sorry I’m late. Didn’t you hear the horn? Good Lord, has someone died?”
He would deny, too, the flood of relief, the tremor in every limb as he got to his feet and had to sit down again.
On the platform, a shadow wavered, set and printed itself on the air for all time. Waiting, impatient, unknowing, for joy.