Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(33)
“Why ever would you find yourself in such a situation?” She reached for his hand, but he pulled it away and looked down and studied his tall boots. “You know I adore you, Sigi.”
“What a queen you would make, Irene. Your wit, your intelligence, your beauty,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “Yet it can never be so, can it?”
“Kings can do what they wish.”
“Crown princes cannot.”
“A crown prince could wait until he became king.” Her voice broke, just a bit as she began, for the first time, to doubt him.
“I did love you,” he said, his lips in a hard line. “It was a lapse in judgment and must be stopped. Crown princes do not permanently ally themselves with girls from the opera. It simply isn’t done.”
“I did not ask you to make me your queen.” Irene stepped back from him, aghast.
“I cannot risk that someday you might.” He turned away from her and started for the door.
“So this is to be our parting?” she asked, blanching. She had not expected the loss of him to cut so close.
“It cannot be any other way. How could I ever trust a woman like you? I have just watched you deceive, with shocking ease, a respectable woman.”
“I did it to help you!”
“Someday you might turn on me,” he said. “I required your assistance, and you gave it—brilliantly. Now that I know what you are capable of, I must never see you again.”
“I did not expect cruelty from you.” She spat the words.
“I never thought I would give it, especially to you.” He silently contemplated how easily it had come to him; perhaps he ought not to have rejected it as a useful tool. “Yet I do not think anything else capable of so well severing our ties. I will always think fondly of our time together, Irene.”
“I shall endeavor to do the same, painful though it will be.” She crossed to her dressing table, upon which the cabinet photograph of the two of them stood, and reached for it. He was gone before she could pick it up and hand it to him. Her heart ached as she looked at the image, taken when they had been so very happy. She would have given it to him, if only to save him from the worry his father had felt knowing his letters might be made public at any time. She had misjudged the prince, taken him for a burly sort of good-hearted barbarian rather than a calculating royal concerned only with his narrow bit of the world.
Perhaps it was for the best, her having the picture. Not that she would ever use it against him—it was his character, not hers, that deserved to be thrown into doubt—but this last meeting made her wonder if she might, one day, require the protection it could provide. She would never taunt him with it, never threaten him. But what about him? Would Wilhelm ever lash out against her? If so, it could serve as a weapon of defense.
This, Irene thought, was not the last she would hear from him, this disloyal, ungrateful lout. She would guard the photograph with everything she had. The Crown Prince of Bohemia was not a man to be trusted.
THE SPIRITUALIST
by David Morrell
Again, the nightmare woke him. Again, he couldn’t go back to sleep.
As the bells of nearby Westminster Abbey sounded two o’clock, Conan Doyle rose from his bed. Always determined not to waste time, he considered going to the desk in his sitting room to write a few more thousand words, but instead his troubled mood prompted him to dress and go down the stairs. Careful not to wake his housekeeper, he unlocked the door and stepped outside.
A cold mist enveloped shadowy Victoria Street in the heart of metropolitan London. During the day, the rumble and rattle of motor vehicles reverberated off the area’s three-story buildings, but at this solitary hour, the only sound was the echo of Conan Doyle’s shoes as he reached the pavement and turned to the left, proceeding past dark shops.
Even in the night and the mist, the back of Westminster Abbey dominated, its hulking presence rising over him. He recalled his sense of irony a year earlier when he’d finally found a suitable location for the most important enterprise of his life, noting that it was only a stone’s throw from one of England’s most revered religious sites. He hadn’t spoken with His Grace about their competing views, but he suspected that the archbishop wasn’t amused.
A hazy streetlamp revealed the sign above the door: PSYCHIC BOOK SHOP, LIBRARY & MUSEUM. Because a sense of urgency always propelled him, Conan Doyle stretched his long legs to walk the short distance, but of late, those legs—once so strong in rugby, soccer, and cricket—had betrayed him, as had his once-powerful chest, making him pause to catch his breath before he unlocked the door and entered.
A bell rang. During the day, its jangle was welcome, announcing that a rare visitor had arrived, but at night, the bell violated the stillness. Gas lamps would have provided an appropriate moody atmosphere. This was 1926, however. Instead of striking a match and opening a valve, Conan Doyle reached to his left and turned an electrical switch. Two bulbs on each wall provided instant illumination, as did dangling globes in the ceiling. The yellow lights revealed numerous rows of bookshelves, the smell of old and new pages pleasantly filling his nostrils.
He knew their titles without needing to see them: among them, Letters on Animal Magnetism, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, The Spirit Manifestations, Experiments in Thought Transference, Phantasms of the Living, Minutes of the Society for Psychical Research, Survival of Bodily Death, and—