Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(37)

“I had a book by Leigh Hunt next to my bed! I was just about to start reading it. How could the medium have possibly known this?”

“Perhaps . . .”

“Perhaps what? Say what you’re thinking.”

“When you arrived for the séance, did the medium’s assistant ask you and your friend to wait in an anteroom?”

“That’s the customary procedure.”

“Perhaps the medium stood on the other side of a wall and listened to your conversation, learning personal details, repeating them later, claiming to receive this information from a spirit. Did you have any religious convictions that prepared you for your belief in a spirit world?”

“Not at all. I was raised as a Roman Catholic. When I was nine, I was sent to a Jesuit preparatory school and then a Jesuit college. All told, I spent eight years in those schools, but the only afterlife I hoped for was one in which the priests would stop beating me. No, nothing prepared me for my interest in the spirits.”

“Nine is an early age for your parents to have sent you away.”

“My family life was . . .”

“Yes?”

“It isn’t relevant,” Conan Doyle said. “My belief in the attempts of spirits to reach us was reinforced in eighteen ninety. I remember vividly that the month was November. I read an item in the British Medical Journal about a conference that was about to convene in Berlin. The subject of the conference was new ways to treat tuberculosis.”

Holmes gestured, encouraging him to proceed.

“I can’t explain the urgency that suddenly compelled me,” Conan Doyle said. “All at once, I knew that it was essential for me to go to that conference. I packed a bag and immediately departed for Germany.”

“Leaving your wife and your almost two-year-old daughter,” Holmes noted.

“That’s why my urgency is so difficult to explain,” Conan Doyle emphasized. “I had every reason to remain with my family. Earlier that year, I’d studied ophthalmology in Vienna. Then I’d moved my family to London, and suddenly I felt a desperate need to travel yet again, to go to Germany and attend a conference about a disease that wasn’t even related to my specialty. My abrupt journey didn’t make sense. But I soon understood why I’d felt the urgency.”

“Now I’m the one who fails to see the relevance,” Holmes said.

“Tuberculosis. Three years later, my first wife was diagnosed with the disease. Isn’t it obvious? The spirits compelled me to learn what I could about the latest in treatments. They knew I would soon need that vital information when my wife displayed her terrible symptoms.”

“But there might be another explanation,” Holmes suggested.

“And what would that be?” Conan Doyle asked impatiently.

“You’re a physician. Perhaps you subconsciously sensed the early indications of your wife’s disease.”

“There weren’t any early indications—none whatsoever! My wife thought nothing of joining me on thirty-mile daily bicycle rides. Her lungs were strong. But then, three years later, in eighteen ninety-three, she became ill.”

“Eighteen ninety-three,” Holmes said. “Didn’t your father die that year?”

“It was a difficult time.”

“He was in a mental institution near Edinburgh, I believe.”

“I prefer not to discuss my father’s illness.”

“Alcohol addiction,” Holmes said. “I gather that on one occasion, when he couldn’t obtain gin or wine or beer, he drank furniture varnish. He sold his clothing in order to buy alcohol. The bed linen. His sketches. Children’s toys. Anything. Please, remind me of what your father sketched.”

Conan Doyle stood straighter. “I told you I prefer not to discuss my father’s illness.”

“Were you able to journey to Edinburgh and attend his funeral?”

“Unfortunately, my wife’s tuberculosis prevented me.”

“And while all this was happening in eighteen ninety-three,” Holmes said, “you killed me.”

“I didn’t kill you! Only Moriarty plunged into the falls! How many times must I explain it?”

“As far as you were concerned, I was dead. Whoever that imposter is in the later stories, it isn’t me. But let’s move on. It wasn’t until fifteen years later, in nineteen eighteen, that you published The New Revelation and your readers finally learned about your belief in spiritualism. They were surprised that you’d shifted from an interest in science to mysticism.”

“There’s nothing mystical about it,” Conan Doyle protested. “Twenty years ago, people would have mocked me if I’d said that voices could travel great distances through the air, and yet Marconi’s radio accomplished what until recently would have been thought a supernatural occurrence. Science will eventually prove that an afterworld exists just as certainly as this world exists.”

“Your first spiritualist book coincided with the end of the war.”

“Yes, the blasted war.” Conan Doyle looked down at the stone floor. “I imagined that the conflict would be noble, that a cleaner, better, stronger nation would come out of it. How wrong I was.” His voice faltered. “How far the war was from anything that was noble. So many died, and so brutally. I wasn’t prepared.”