Antidote to Sorrow -- Part 4
February 16th 1894
Alice, in an entirely uncharacteristic fit of thoughtlessness , knocked on my study door and then entered before I had a chance to tell her to wait, and so caught me with my sleeve still rolled up, just in the act of withdrawing the needle.
“I’m so sorry!” she blurted at once, dropping into an appalled curtsey,
“Never enter without waiting for an answer again,” I thundered at her.
“I - I won’t, I’m so sorry, sir!” she stammered, though she was too obviously staring at the syringe where I had banged it down on the desk. “But it’s marked Urgent, and, well, it’s come a bit open and I couldn’t help seeing it was from Scotland Yard, and...”
If I had not been angry with her, if I hadn’t wanted to escape the scene she had witnessed, I might not have gone. But I gave myself no time to reflect; I was out of the house and rattling along in a cab to Greenwich before I asked myself what the purpose of this expedition was.
I re-read the telegram. PLEASE COME AT ONCE IF POSS SERIOUS INCIDENT GREENWICH OBSERVATORY.
I did not cease to be angry, although the focus of the feeling altered. What a nonsense it was, I thought, letting myself be lured off to the scene of a serious incident, as if I could possibly be of any use, as if it was not a transparent, if bizarre, attempt at charity? Get the poor old chap out of the house, give him an interest in life, I thought sourly. Lestrade’s good deed for the day. Did he not realise I had work of my own to occupy me?
I wondered involuntarily what sort of serious incident could have happened at Greenwich and was exasperated at my own curiosity.
Lestrade was waiting for me at the edge of the park, on the corner of Croom’s Hill and Burney Street.
“I don’t know if I should have brought you out in this snow,” he said, and sucked his teeth in a manner that struck me, suddenly, as unbearably irritating. “You do look run down.”
“Ah, the razor-sharp acuity of Scotland Yard,” I said, in a withering voice that did not seem mine at all.
For a moment we stared at each other, quite equally shocked. My hand went to my mouth. I would never have permitted myself to voice such a thing if I had had the least idea I was going to say it.
“Lestrade,” I said, almost in a gasp. “That was dreadfully rude of me. And when you’ve been so kind. I am very sorry.”
“That’s all right, Dr. Watson,” said Lestrade, and gave a lopsided grin. “You did give me a fright, though. You sounded just like him for a second. ”
I would have apologised again but my throat had closed and I dared not try to speak. “He is still very much on my mind,” I said at last, when I thought, not altogether correctly, that I could trust my voice.
“All of ours,” Lestrade said, softly, and was silent for a moment. “But really, are you all right?”
“Perfectly,” I said. “Well - a little run down, as you say. How can I be of use?”
“The fact of it is,” said Lestrade, “There’s been a bombing.”
I was, for the second time in the course of the conversation, speechless. Like every Londoner I have read of the terrible anarchist attacks in Paris and I had worried, but my mind seemed to lock itself shut against the news that at last it had happened here.
“We’ve been lucky. So far, anyway. No one’s hurt except the chap himself,” said Lestrade grimly, and I felt myself exhale. “In the middle of the park in front of the Observatory. God knows what he was trying to do. They’ve taken him over to the Seamen’s Hospital, but he won’t last long. I’d like you to see him.”
“What can I...?”
“Well, first of all, Doctor, no one here knows a thing about these kind of wounds, but I’m pretty sure you do,” said Lestrade. “Secondly, he isn’t saying anything, and I thought he might just possibly talk to you. People do.”
I followed him numbly, but as we approached the placid, white-fronted building, looked back at the park at the blue-green domes of the Observatory, rising above the bare trees into the fine powder of snow. There were a few gawkers about - not that I have much business calling them such - watching the police who were still arriving in considerable numbers. Otherwise Greenwich seemed almost deserted.
The latest outrage in Paris had been in a crowded cafe. What was an anarchist with a bomb doing here?
The anarchist was quite young, though I did not see that at first. His face was stiff with agony. He was a small, wirily built man, with dark hair receding slightly from a broad forehead, and a straight sweep of moustache. His clothes had been cut away and an orderly was holding him down while a doctor worked on him -- screening the damage at first from my sight.
Then the doctor shifted, and I saw. The man’s left hand was gone entirely, and his torso had been blasted open, loops of intestine spilling out between torn rags of flesh.
For the briefest of moments, I was in Afghanistan. I do not mean I hallucinated or literally forgot where I was -- but the air changed texture, seemed to shudder and ring, as if in the throbbing aftermath of inhuman roaring.
To see wounds like that in peacetime, in the heart of London. . .
The man was moaning breathlessly, feeble cries which briefly gathered as I entered to an awful, thin, collapsing wail. His legs kept weakly jerking, as he tried instinctively to curl up around the hurt.
I was already stripping off my coat, but I knew at once Lestrade was right; nothing would preserve his life for longer than an hour. “Morphine, for God’s sake,” I said.
“He’s had morphine,” said one of the doctors. “He won’t be able to talk if we give him much more.”
“He won’t be able to talk if he can’t draw breath without screaming either,” I said. “Get pillows and straps. Prop his legs up.”
I made them draw his thighs as close to the abdomen as possible- it reduces tension on the muscles of the belly. And I was generous with the morphine. It takes a very great deal, I knew, to douse the blaze of a wound like that. In Afghanistan the question was always only whether I could spare enough.
Little by little, his moans quieted, and he ceased struggling. His eyelids fluttered, and he looked at me for a moment, before screwing his eyes shut. I teased out a handful of shrapnel-pieces, and staunched the ensuing bleeding; I wrapped wet gauze about a coil of loose intestine, laid it carefully back in the cavity, and packed in more gauze around it - not so much to prevent further blood-loss as to ease what I was sure must have been the most horrible feeling of gouged-out emptiness. The other doctor - Willes by name -- had already ligated a number of torn blood-vessels. There was nothing more that could be done for the sufferer. I laid a sheet over the wreckage, concealing it.
The man looked at me again. His features smoothed, and it was now that I realised he was still only in his twenties - much the youngest man in the room. He whispered, “Vous êtes gentil.”
There was a small silence. “You didn’t say he was French,” I accused Lestrade, with a kind of displaced panic.
“He didn’t say a word before now. What was that?”
“ ‘You are kind’,” I translated.
“He did speak before,” corrected Willes, “And he does know English. He said ‘Take me home’ when we got him here. English,” he commanded his patient sternly.
There was, unsurprisingly, no reply from the patient, and Lestrade ignored the interruption. His eyes brightened. “You can talk to him, then, can you?” he asked me.
It seemed vaguely unreasonable to me that with a name like Lestrade he couldn’t do it himself. I hesitated.
“Don’t look at me,” said Willes. “I never got much further than lee bong pang at school."
My spoken French is at best mediocre. “Comment vous appellez-vous?” I tried, without much hope.
Nothing. His eyes remained open, but they wandered glassily over the ceiling.
“Regardez-moi,” I said, more softly. “S’il vous plait, regardez-moi. Pourquoi? Pourquoi avez vous...” I struggled. “Pourquoi avez-vous fait ceci? Je vous en prie. Il faut que vous expliquiez.”
He gave a kind of sob and his remaining hand clutched at mine.
He had just let off a bomb in the city I loved.
He was dying in agony.
I stood there with a terrorist, muttering to him in French, and letting him hold my hand. I could see Willes stiffen slightly with restrained distaste, and could not blame him. He must have heard the explosion.
“Doucement, doucement,” And here was another way in which I was a poor substitute for the man Lestrade and I should have been accompanying. If only I had not been so limited in what I could say, perhaps I might have learned so much more. I could only do what I could with the scraps I could remember and the tone of my voice. “Soyez calme, et l’expliquez-moi.”
His breathing slowly grew a little more regular. I stroked my thumb across the back of his hand and suddenly he whispered, “Je peux pas... je peux pas expliquer. J’avais dû le prendre ici.”
“ ‘I can’t explain. I had to take it here,’ ” I reported to Lestrade.
“Personne n’etait blessé?”
“He’s asking if anyone else was hurt. Non, non,” I reassured the man on the bed.
“No thanks to him,” muttered Willes.
“Ask if there’s anyone else we need to worry about,” said Lestrade.
“Vous êtes tout seul? Il y a des autres?”
“Seul. Seul,” whispered the dying man, and the desolation in the word seemed to strike him at the same moment it did me; his eyes widened and their focus slipped beyond me into faraway dark.
I heard Lestrade suck his teeth again, dubiously, as I relayed this answer to him. I did not take my eyes off the anarchist’s face. He chanted to himself, something indecipherable, on the edge of his breath. Then, very faintly, his lips twitched. If it was a smile, and not a meaningless quirk of the muscles, it was hardly the wild ecstatic smile of the martyred zealot, rather something resigned and half-amused and private.
I am sure he murmured the words, “La princesse,” before his breath scraped and stopped, and his hand went slack in mine.
* * *
Afterwards, when I had washed the blood from my hands, I returned to examine the corpse more closely, while Lestrade went through the remains of his clothes.
Lestrade had not been near enough to hear the man’s final words, but he did not need them translated. A constable had already been sent racing off, with telegrams for the Commissioner of Police, advising that the arrangements forn the Royal family’s protection be reviewed with the utmost urgency, especially in the case of the princesses. I thought of the assassinations in Russia in the eighties and I shuddered, yet I said to Lestrade. “I don’t think that’s what he meant.”
Lestrade frowned. “Why not?”
But I did not know why not. And certainly I would not have countermanded Lestrade’s instructions, even if it had been in my power.
“I think he might be a tailor,” I ventured, and Lestrade looked at me quizzically. “Or perhaps an upholsterer,” I amended self-consciously. I lifted back the man’s upper lip, to show what I had seen when he was speaking. “There’s grooving on his upper right incisor, here -- it comes of biting through thread.”
Lestrade made a melancholy, fond little noise of recognition and gave no further comment. But he opened a purse that had been in the dead man’s coat, and whistled: “£13 in gold’s a lot for a tailor to be carrying.”
The mystery of the man’s motive remains, but that of his identity was resolved swiftly enough - Lestrade extracted from his trouser pocket a ticket for Club Autonomie - a popular place, Lestrade told me, with London’s French and German anarchists. It was marked with the dead man’s name - Martial Bourdin.
There seemed no more for me to do in the hospital. I left Lestrade and crossed back to the park. I thought I would look at the scene of the explosion and paced my way slowly to the patch of blackened path, watching the ground as I went. Was there anything here to reveal whether he had truly come here alone, whether he had met anyone, where he had come from, what he was thinking?
But at ten to five it was already almost dark, and the constables were already scouring the ground. They had found a number of bone fragments from Bourdin’s hand by the time I arrived. Though a disconsolate voice in my head complained about the data their boots might be obliterating, it was soon obvious to me that I would not see anything they did not.
I could feel the presence of web of meaning that must be spread across the city, radiating from that body in the hospital, and yet I could not see it. But for a moment I could almost see the tall, spare figure, darting ahead of me across the grass, reading the leaves and the earth as fluently as print. I almost said aloud the words I catch myself writing on prescription pads and envelopes, in the margins of stories and even sometimes the pages of this journal, though I always ink them over or tear them out. Come back. Come back.
* * *
I came home chilled by cold air and old horrors. I dropped onto the settee by the fire, and sat kneading my shoulder.
After a time, I rolled up my sleeve. The little wound was already invisible.
[Pages torn out]
February 23rd, 1894
Bourdin was buried today. One of his comrades attempted to make a speech at the graveside, and was bundled away by the police, though they did not arrest him. The anarchists were greatly outnumbered by a crowd of outraged Londoners which descended on the course of the small procession. It is not surprising - the city has inevitably been uproar since it happened. I am only glad no one appears to have been seriously hurt.
The police have raided Club Autonomie, and yet no one has been charged with anything.
Bourdin was indeed a tailor, it seems, not that it is particularly relevant to anything.
February 28th
I have spoken to Quinn, the man who tried to give the oration at Bourdin’s funeral. I waited for him for some time yesterday at Myrtle Grove Tavern, quite the most extraordinarily squalid public house I have ever entered, stinking of stale beer and stale hay. Oddly, having insisted on meeting there, Carl Quinn drank only water. He was a fair-haired, balding, nervous young man with a bruise on his face who insisted that his friend had been a convinced and enthusiastic anarchist but not one with any sympathy for “propaganda by deed”, as he called the attacks in Paris.
He said - and I may as well note that I believe him - that he came by his bruises when he was arrested during the raid on Autonomie, and he had very decided views on who was really behind the Greenwich bombing.
“The police are into everything,” he told me, in a lowered voice. “The movement’s riddled with them. Samuels for one. It’s all Samuels. He’s a police spy. He’s up to his neck in what happened to Martial, I know it.”
I settled on replying to this by asking carefully, “How do you know he’s is a police spy?”
“Because he’s so bloody extreme,” said Quinn. “I admit he had me fooled for a while, I thought he just liked to make people face facts, shake them up -that’s good in revolution, that’s why I worked on the Commonweal with him. But that’s all he wanted all along, -- he probably set up Nicoll to be arrested so he could get the Commonweal. Ever since he’s been editor it’s been obvious what his real agenda is -- someone blows up a theatre in Barcelona and he starts printing articles saying isn’ t it wonderful thirty rich people died. Nobody really thinks like that. It’s all stealth propaganda to scare the bourgeoisie.”
I mentioned that apparently some people did think like that, or the theatre would presumably still be standing. Quinn took immediate and personal offence.
“I have nothing to do with random slaughter. I want to awaken the workers so that they know their friends from their enemies. The anarchist cause is not violent. Anarchism is the absolute negation and rejection of violence. And violence is unchristlike. Yes,” he added haughtily, folding his arms, “I am a Christian Anarchist. Write that down,” he added, glaring at me suspiciously, as if I might be trying to trick him somehow by not doing so.
“These are just notes for my own use, Mr Quinn,” I said. “I’m not writing a story.”
He frowned, peered distrustfully at my notebook, and demanded, “But you’re John Watson, aren’t you? Why not?”
He gave me no peace until I had transcribed his remarks to his satisfaction.
I tried to find Samuels but he was not at his rooms and I had patients waiting. Instead, in the far more wholesome atmosphere of the Blue Posts, I asked Lestrade about him.
“Not a nice character, I agree,” said Lestrade. “But don’t worry about him, Doctor - Special Branch keep a close eye on him.”
After talking to Quinn, this was not wholly reassuring.
“Why wasn’t he arrested when they raided the club?” I said. “He was one of Bourdin’s circle, and he’s openly called for violence in his paper- they arrested far more harmless people.”
Lestrade looked at me with narrowed eyes, then laughed uncomfortably. “You haven’t let that poor lunatic Quinn convince you we’ve all got nothing better to do than play-act being anarchists?”
“No, of course not,” I said, sighing.
“I don’t say there’s no informers,” added Lestrade, even more uncomfortably. “But they know what they’re doing.”
Lestrade has nothing more to do with the investigation - now it is all in the hands of Special Branch and Inspector Melville - who foiled the Jubilee Plot in ’87, and surely would think my ill-informed attempts at meddling in this case very absurd.
It is not even clear there is a case to meddle in. The inquest concluded a plot to blow up the observatory was foiled by the culprit’s own incompetence, and there the matter rests.
“I’d leave this one alone, Dr Watson,” advised Lestrade.
And what else can I do? I was of some use to Lestrade on the day of the explosion. No one since has asked for my help. I have no special expertise the professionals do not share, I have seen no clue that they have not. I don’t even know what they know and there is no reason they should tell me. What excuse do I have to jam myself in among the cogs of a machine I cannot even properly see? A wish to know what I should think of a young man who died clutching my hand is not excuse enough.
I admit though, I find I should like to have some part in solving another mystery, if only once more.
Especially now.
April 3rd, 1894
The papers are full of this Adair murder.
I am well aware that my contribution in the Grenfell matter was little more than a fluke, and I have achieved nothing meaningful in the Bourdin case at all.
But I shall go down to Park Lane tomorrow anyway. Surely it can do no harm to try.
________
Author’s Note:
Martial Bourdin, a 26-year-old anarchist, did indeed let off a bomb outside the Greenwich Observatory on 16th February, 1894, injuring only himself and dying shortly afterwards. Watson and Lestrade were not, of course, there, (I have had to fudge Bourdin’s time of death a little in order to get Watson there in time to speak to him) and the scene between Watson and Bourdin is thus entirely imaginary. Bourdin died without explaining anything (he did, however, say “take me home” in heavy accented English). Little is known about him, and the truth behind the bombing has never been established.
Willes, Quinn and Samuels are also real people, and Quinn was indeed a “Christian Anarchist”, though my character is mostly imaginary. His beliefs about Samuels and the police infiltrators of the anarchist movement were shared by many anarchists at the time.
In The Empty House, Holmes backhandedly compliments Lestrade on solving “the Molesey Mystery”. I have based my imaginary account of this on another real case - though one from the 1920s, the Birdhurst Rise poisonings. It also remains unsolved, and I am quite sure the poor housekeeper had nothing to do with it.
Alice, in an entirely uncharacteristic fit of thoughtlessness , knocked on my study door and then entered before I had a chance to tell her to wait, and so caught me with my sleeve still rolled up, just in the act of withdrawing the needle.
“I’m so sorry!” she blurted at once, dropping into an appalled curtsey,
“Never enter without waiting for an answer again,” I thundered at her.
“I - I won’t, I’m so sorry, sir!” she stammered, though she was too obviously staring at the syringe where I had banged it down on the desk. “But it’s marked Urgent, and, well, it’s come a bit open and I couldn’t help seeing it was from Scotland Yard, and...”
If I had not been angry with her, if I hadn’t wanted to escape the scene she had witnessed, I might not have gone. But I gave myself no time to reflect; I was out of the house and rattling along in a cab to Greenwich before I asked myself what the purpose of this expedition was.
I re-read the telegram. PLEASE COME AT ONCE IF POSS SERIOUS INCIDENT GREENWICH OBSERVATORY.
I did not cease to be angry, although the focus of the feeling altered. What a nonsense it was, I thought, letting myself be lured off to the scene of a serious incident, as if I could possibly be of any use, as if it was not a transparent, if bizarre, attempt at charity? Get the poor old chap out of the house, give him an interest in life, I thought sourly. Lestrade’s good deed for the day. Did he not realise I had work of my own to occupy me?
I wondered involuntarily what sort of serious incident could have happened at Greenwich and was exasperated at my own curiosity.
Lestrade was waiting for me at the edge of the park, on the corner of Croom’s Hill and Burney Street.
“I don’t know if I should have brought you out in this snow,” he said, and sucked his teeth in a manner that struck me, suddenly, as unbearably irritating. “You do look run down.”
“Ah, the razor-sharp acuity of Scotland Yard,” I said, in a withering voice that did not seem mine at all.
For a moment we stared at each other, quite equally shocked. My hand went to my mouth. I would never have permitted myself to voice such a thing if I had had the least idea I was going to say it.
“Lestrade,” I said, almost in a gasp. “That was dreadfully rude of me. And when you’ve been so kind. I am very sorry.”
“That’s all right, Dr. Watson,” said Lestrade, and gave a lopsided grin. “You did give me a fright, though. You sounded just like him for a second. ”
I would have apologised again but my throat had closed and I dared not try to speak. “He is still very much on my mind,” I said at last, when I thought, not altogether correctly, that I could trust my voice.
“All of ours,” Lestrade said, softly, and was silent for a moment. “But really, are you all right?”
“Perfectly,” I said. “Well - a little run down, as you say. How can I be of use?”
“The fact of it is,” said Lestrade, “There’s been a bombing.”
I was, for the second time in the course of the conversation, speechless. Like every Londoner I have read of the terrible anarchist attacks in Paris and I had worried, but my mind seemed to lock itself shut against the news that at last it had happened here.
“We’ve been lucky. So far, anyway. No one’s hurt except the chap himself,” said Lestrade grimly, and I felt myself exhale. “In the middle of the park in front of the Observatory. God knows what he was trying to do. They’ve taken him over to the Seamen’s Hospital, but he won’t last long. I’d like you to see him.”
“What can I...?”
“Well, first of all, Doctor, no one here knows a thing about these kind of wounds, but I’m pretty sure you do,” said Lestrade. “Secondly, he isn’t saying anything, and I thought he might just possibly talk to you. People do.”
I followed him numbly, but as we approached the placid, white-fronted building, looked back at the park at the blue-green domes of the Observatory, rising above the bare trees into the fine powder of snow. There were a few gawkers about - not that I have much business calling them such - watching the police who were still arriving in considerable numbers. Otherwise Greenwich seemed almost deserted.
The latest outrage in Paris had been in a crowded cafe. What was an anarchist with a bomb doing here?
The anarchist was quite young, though I did not see that at first. His face was stiff with agony. He was a small, wirily built man, with dark hair receding slightly from a broad forehead, and a straight sweep of moustache. His clothes had been cut away and an orderly was holding him down while a doctor worked on him -- screening the damage at first from my sight.
Then the doctor shifted, and I saw. The man’s left hand was gone entirely, and his torso had been blasted open, loops of intestine spilling out between torn rags of flesh.
For the briefest of moments, I was in Afghanistan. I do not mean I hallucinated or literally forgot where I was -- but the air changed texture, seemed to shudder and ring, as if in the throbbing aftermath of inhuman roaring.
To see wounds like that in peacetime, in the heart of London. . .
The man was moaning breathlessly, feeble cries which briefly gathered as I entered to an awful, thin, collapsing wail. His legs kept weakly jerking, as he tried instinctively to curl up around the hurt.
I was already stripping off my coat, but I knew at once Lestrade was right; nothing would preserve his life for longer than an hour. “Morphine, for God’s sake,” I said.
“He’s had morphine,” said one of the doctors. “He won’t be able to talk if we give him much more.”
“He won’t be able to talk if he can’t draw breath without screaming either,” I said. “Get pillows and straps. Prop his legs up.”
I made them draw his thighs as close to the abdomen as possible- it reduces tension on the muscles of the belly. And I was generous with the morphine. It takes a very great deal, I knew, to douse the blaze of a wound like that. In Afghanistan the question was always only whether I could spare enough.
Little by little, his moans quieted, and he ceased struggling. His eyelids fluttered, and he looked at me for a moment, before screwing his eyes shut. I teased out a handful of shrapnel-pieces, and staunched the ensuing bleeding; I wrapped wet gauze about a coil of loose intestine, laid it carefully back in the cavity, and packed in more gauze around it - not so much to prevent further blood-loss as to ease what I was sure must have been the most horrible feeling of gouged-out emptiness. The other doctor - Willes by name -- had already ligated a number of torn blood-vessels. There was nothing more that could be done for the sufferer. I laid a sheet over the wreckage, concealing it.
The man looked at me again. His features smoothed, and it was now that I realised he was still only in his twenties - much the youngest man in the room. He whispered, “Vous êtes gentil.”
There was a small silence. “You didn’t say he was French,” I accused Lestrade, with a kind of displaced panic.
“He didn’t say a word before now. What was that?”
“ ‘You are kind’,” I translated.
“He did speak before,” corrected Willes, “And he does know English. He said ‘Take me home’ when we got him here. English,” he commanded his patient sternly.
There was, unsurprisingly, no reply from the patient, and Lestrade ignored the interruption. His eyes brightened. “You can talk to him, then, can you?” he asked me.
It seemed vaguely unreasonable to me that with a name like Lestrade he couldn’t do it himself. I hesitated.
“Don’t look at me,” said Willes. “I never got much further than lee bong pang at school."
My spoken French is at best mediocre. “Comment vous appellez-vous?” I tried, without much hope.
Nothing. His eyes remained open, but they wandered glassily over the ceiling.
“Regardez-moi,” I said, more softly. “S’il vous plait, regardez-moi. Pourquoi? Pourquoi avez vous...” I struggled. “Pourquoi avez-vous fait ceci? Je vous en prie. Il faut que vous expliquiez.”
He gave a kind of sob and his remaining hand clutched at mine.
He had just let off a bomb in the city I loved.
He was dying in agony.
I stood there with a terrorist, muttering to him in French, and letting him hold my hand. I could see Willes stiffen slightly with restrained distaste, and could not blame him. He must have heard the explosion.
“Doucement, doucement,” And here was another way in which I was a poor substitute for the man Lestrade and I should have been accompanying. If only I had not been so limited in what I could say, perhaps I might have learned so much more. I could only do what I could with the scraps I could remember and the tone of my voice. “Soyez calme, et l’expliquez-moi.”
His breathing slowly grew a little more regular. I stroked my thumb across the back of his hand and suddenly he whispered, “Je peux pas... je peux pas expliquer. J’avais dû le prendre ici.”
“ ‘I can’t explain. I had to take it here,’ ” I reported to Lestrade.
“Personne n’etait blessé?”
“He’s asking if anyone else was hurt. Non, non,” I reassured the man on the bed.
“No thanks to him,” muttered Willes.
“Ask if there’s anyone else we need to worry about,” said Lestrade.
“Vous êtes tout seul? Il y a des autres?”
“Seul. Seul,” whispered the dying man, and the desolation in the word seemed to strike him at the same moment it did me; his eyes widened and their focus slipped beyond me into faraway dark.
I heard Lestrade suck his teeth again, dubiously, as I relayed this answer to him. I did not take my eyes off the anarchist’s face. He chanted to himself, something indecipherable, on the edge of his breath. Then, very faintly, his lips twitched. If it was a smile, and not a meaningless quirk of the muscles, it was hardly the wild ecstatic smile of the martyred zealot, rather something resigned and half-amused and private.
I am sure he murmured the words, “La princesse,” before his breath scraped and stopped, and his hand went slack in mine.
* * *
Afterwards, when I had washed the blood from my hands, I returned to examine the corpse more closely, while Lestrade went through the remains of his clothes.
Lestrade had not been near enough to hear the man’s final words, but he did not need them translated. A constable had already been sent racing off, with telegrams for the Commissioner of Police, advising that the arrangements forn the Royal family’s protection be reviewed with the utmost urgency, especially in the case of the princesses. I thought of the assassinations in Russia in the eighties and I shuddered, yet I said to Lestrade. “I don’t think that’s what he meant.”
Lestrade frowned. “Why not?”
But I did not know why not. And certainly I would not have countermanded Lestrade’s instructions, even if it had been in my power.
“I think he might be a tailor,” I ventured, and Lestrade looked at me quizzically. “Or perhaps an upholsterer,” I amended self-consciously. I lifted back the man’s upper lip, to show what I had seen when he was speaking. “There’s grooving on his upper right incisor, here -- it comes of biting through thread.”
Lestrade made a melancholy, fond little noise of recognition and gave no further comment. But he opened a purse that had been in the dead man’s coat, and whistled: “£13 in gold’s a lot for a tailor to be carrying.”
The mystery of the man’s motive remains, but that of his identity was resolved swiftly enough - Lestrade extracted from his trouser pocket a ticket for Club Autonomie - a popular place, Lestrade told me, with London’s French and German anarchists. It was marked with the dead man’s name - Martial Bourdin.
There seemed no more for me to do in the hospital. I left Lestrade and crossed back to the park. I thought I would look at the scene of the explosion and paced my way slowly to the patch of blackened path, watching the ground as I went. Was there anything here to reveal whether he had truly come here alone, whether he had met anyone, where he had come from, what he was thinking?
But at ten to five it was already almost dark, and the constables were already scouring the ground. They had found a number of bone fragments from Bourdin’s hand by the time I arrived. Though a disconsolate voice in my head complained about the data their boots might be obliterating, it was soon obvious to me that I would not see anything they did not.
I could feel the presence of web of meaning that must be spread across the city, radiating from that body in the hospital, and yet I could not see it. But for a moment I could almost see the tall, spare figure, darting ahead of me across the grass, reading the leaves and the earth as fluently as print. I almost said aloud the words I catch myself writing on prescription pads and envelopes, in the margins of stories and even sometimes the pages of this journal, though I always ink them over or tear them out. Come back. Come back.
* * *
I came home chilled by cold air and old horrors. I dropped onto the settee by the fire, and sat kneading my shoulder.
After a time, I rolled up my sleeve. The little wound was already invisible.
[Pages torn out]
February 23rd, 1894
Bourdin was buried today. One of his comrades attempted to make a speech at the graveside, and was bundled away by the police, though they did not arrest him. The anarchists were greatly outnumbered by a crowd of outraged Londoners which descended on the course of the small procession. It is not surprising - the city has inevitably been uproar since it happened. I am only glad no one appears to have been seriously hurt.
The police have raided Club Autonomie, and yet no one has been charged with anything.
Bourdin was indeed a tailor, it seems, not that it is particularly relevant to anything.
February 28th
I have spoken to Quinn, the man who tried to give the oration at Bourdin’s funeral. I waited for him for some time yesterday at Myrtle Grove Tavern, quite the most extraordinarily squalid public house I have ever entered, stinking of stale beer and stale hay. Oddly, having insisted on meeting there, Carl Quinn drank only water. He was a fair-haired, balding, nervous young man with a bruise on his face who insisted that his friend had been a convinced and enthusiastic anarchist but not one with any sympathy for “propaganda by deed”, as he called the attacks in Paris.
He said - and I may as well note that I believe him - that he came by his bruises when he was arrested during the raid on Autonomie, and he had very decided views on who was really behind the Greenwich bombing.
“The police are into everything,” he told me, in a lowered voice. “The movement’s riddled with them. Samuels for one. It’s all Samuels. He’s a police spy. He’s up to his neck in what happened to Martial, I know it.”
I settled on replying to this by asking carefully, “How do you know he’s is a police spy?”
“Because he’s so bloody extreme,” said Quinn. “I admit he had me fooled for a while, I thought he just liked to make people face facts, shake them up -that’s good in revolution, that’s why I worked on the Commonweal with him. But that’s all he wanted all along, -- he probably set up Nicoll to be arrested so he could get the Commonweal. Ever since he’s been editor it’s been obvious what his real agenda is -- someone blows up a theatre in Barcelona and he starts printing articles saying isn’ t it wonderful thirty rich people died. Nobody really thinks like that. It’s all stealth propaganda to scare the bourgeoisie.”
I mentioned that apparently some people did think like that, or the theatre would presumably still be standing. Quinn took immediate and personal offence.
“I have nothing to do with random slaughter. I want to awaken the workers so that they know their friends from their enemies. The anarchist cause is not violent. Anarchism is the absolute negation and rejection of violence. And violence is unchristlike. Yes,” he added haughtily, folding his arms, “I am a Christian Anarchist. Write that down,” he added, glaring at me suspiciously, as if I might be trying to trick him somehow by not doing so.
“These are just notes for my own use, Mr Quinn,” I said. “I’m not writing a story.”
He frowned, peered distrustfully at my notebook, and demanded, “But you’re John Watson, aren’t you? Why not?”
He gave me no peace until I had transcribed his remarks to his satisfaction.
I tried to find Samuels but he was not at his rooms and I had patients waiting. Instead, in the far more wholesome atmosphere of the Blue Posts, I asked Lestrade about him.
“Not a nice character, I agree,” said Lestrade. “But don’t worry about him, Doctor - Special Branch keep a close eye on him.”
After talking to Quinn, this was not wholly reassuring.
“Why wasn’t he arrested when they raided the club?” I said. “He was one of Bourdin’s circle, and he’s openly called for violence in his paper- they arrested far more harmless people.”
Lestrade looked at me with narrowed eyes, then laughed uncomfortably. “You haven’t let that poor lunatic Quinn convince you we’ve all got nothing better to do than play-act being anarchists?”
“No, of course not,” I said, sighing.
“I don’t say there’s no informers,” added Lestrade, even more uncomfortably. “But they know what they’re doing.”
Lestrade has nothing more to do with the investigation - now it is all in the hands of Special Branch and Inspector Melville - who foiled the Jubilee Plot in ’87, and surely would think my ill-informed attempts at meddling in this case very absurd.
It is not even clear there is a case to meddle in. The inquest concluded a plot to blow up the observatory was foiled by the culprit’s own incompetence, and there the matter rests.
“I’d leave this one alone, Dr Watson,” advised Lestrade.
And what else can I do? I was of some use to Lestrade on the day of the explosion. No one since has asked for my help. I have no special expertise the professionals do not share, I have seen no clue that they have not. I don’t even know what they know and there is no reason they should tell me. What excuse do I have to jam myself in among the cogs of a machine I cannot even properly see? A wish to know what I should think of a young man who died clutching my hand is not excuse enough.
I admit though, I find I should like to have some part in solving another mystery, if only once more.
Especially now.
April 3rd, 1894
The papers are full of this Adair murder.
I am well aware that my contribution in the Grenfell matter was little more than a fluke, and I have achieved nothing meaningful in the Bourdin case at all.
But I shall go down to Park Lane tomorrow anyway. Surely it can do no harm to try.
________
Author’s Note:
Martial Bourdin, a 26-year-old anarchist, did indeed let off a bomb outside the Greenwich Observatory on 16th February, 1894, injuring only himself and dying shortly afterwards. Watson and Lestrade were not, of course, there, (I have had to fudge Bourdin’s time of death a little in order to get Watson there in time to speak to him) and the scene between Watson and Bourdin is thus entirely imaginary. Bourdin died without explaining anything (he did, however, say “take me home” in heavy accented English). Little is known about him, and the truth behind the bombing has never been established.
Willes, Quinn and Samuels are also real people, and Quinn was indeed a “Christian Anarchist”, though my character is mostly imaginary. His beliefs about Samuels and the police infiltrators of the anarchist movement were shared by many anarchists at the time.
In The Empty House, Holmes backhandedly compliments Lestrade on solving “the Molesey Mystery”. I have based my imaginary account of this on another real case - though one from the 1920s, the Birdhurst Rise poisonings. It also remains unsolved, and I am quite sure the poor housekeeper had nothing to do with it.