Peter Tremayne - An Ensuing Evil and Others

“Eugene Wraybrook?” queried his son-in-law.

“Even easier. Just change the ending of Wraybrook into another word meaning exactly the same thing- brook becomes burn . Wrayburn. The name still means the place of the remote stream.”

Collins grinned. His father-in-law enjoyed etymology and playing with words. “So what about poor Beth Hexton?”

“Beth is Elizabeth, so we make her Lizzie. Hexton can become Hexam. And there we have my new characters. I can get on now, build up some enthusiasm about rewriting my book. I can even bring in Beth’s father, the dredger. Gaffer Hexam. Ah, to hell with those critics who would say my work is becoming full of dry moral rectitude. Away with such shadows.”

He struck a pose. Collins knew that his father-in-law liked to perform.

Hence, horrible shadow .

Unreal mockery, hence. Why, so being gone .

I am a man again .

Collins nodded slowly. “Well, there was no detective needed in Macbeth , but this has, indeed, been a neat piece of detection.”

“These shadows passing before us, Charley, are the substance of the writers craft,” mused Dickens. “You can let time slip by you with its shadows, who have the agility of a fox, now you see them, now you don’t. The writer must capture them before they disappear. Mind you, I think I can dispense with the character of Sergeant Cuff.”

Charles Collins grimaced. “I felt sorry for poor Sergeant Cuff, off on the wrong track about the diamond and the reason for the murder.” He suddenly grinned. “I’ll have to tell this story to my brother, Wilkie. He’s been saying that he wants to write a novel in which a policeman is called upon to solve a theft of some enormous diamond and subsequent murders. This might give him some ideas.”

Dickens chuckled with a shake of his head. “A policeman solving crimes of theft and murder in a novel? I’ll have to have a word with your brother. No one will believe a policeman as a detective hero.”

“I seem to recall that when Sir James Graham set up his detective department twenty years ago, it was you who used your campaigning journalism to break down public hostility to having a dozen Metropolitan Police sergeants working among them in plain clothes solving crimes.”

Dickens pursed his lips in irritation. “That’s different,” he snapped. “You are talking about a police detective in a novel. The reading public will never buy such a book.”

My narratives of the adventures of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the well-known consulting detective, have always attempted a modicum of discreetness. There is so much of both a personal and professional nature that Holmes confided in me which I have not passed on to posterity-much, I confess, at Holmes’s personal request. Indeed, among Holmes’s personal papers, I had noticed several aide-memoirs that would have expanded my sketches of his cases several times over. It is not often appreciated that while I indulged in my literary diversions, Holmes himself was possessed of a writing talent as demonstrated by over a score of works ranging from his Practical Handbook of Bee Culture to The Book of Life: the science of observation and deduction . But Holmes, to my knowledge, had made it a rule never to write about any of his specific cases.

It was therefore with some surprise that, one day during the spring of 1894, after the adventure I narrated as “The Empty House,” I received from Holmes a small sheaf of handwritten papers with the exhortation that I read them in order that I might understand more fully Holmes’s involvement with the man responsible for the death of the son of Lord Maynooth. Holmes, of course, did not want these details to be revealed to the public. I did acquire permission from him at a later date to the effect that they could be published after his death. In the meantime, I have appended this brief foreword to be placed with the papers and handed both to my bankers and executors with the instruction that they may be released only one hundred years from this date.

It may, then, also be revealed a matter that I have always been sensitive about, in view of the prejudices of our age. Sherlock Holmes was one of the Holmes family of Galway, Ireland, and, like his brother, Mycroft, was a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, where his closest companion had been the poet Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, who even now, as I write, languishes in Reading Gaol. This is the principal reason why I have been reticent about acknowledging Holmes’s background, for it would serve no useful purpose if one fell foul of the bigotry and intolerance that arises out of such a revelation. Many good men and true, but with such backgrounds, have found themselves being shunned by their professions or found their businesses have been destroyed overnight.

This revelation will probably come as no surprise to those discerning readers who have followed Holmes’s adventures. There have been clues enough of Holmes’s origins. Holmes’s greatest adversary, James Moriarty, was of a similar background. Most people will know that the Moriarty family are from Kerry, the very name being an Anglicization of the Irish name O Muircheartaigh, meaning, interestingly enough, “expert navigator.” Moriarty once held a chair of mathematics in Queen’s University in Belfast. It was in Ireland that the enmity between Holmes and Moriarty first started. But that is a story which does not concern us.

If there were not clues enough, there was also Holmes’s fascination with the Celtic languages, of which he was something of an expert. In my narrative “The Devil’s Foot,” I mentioned Holmes’s study on Chaldean Roots in the Ancient Cornish Language . I did not mention that this work won high praise from such experts as the British Museum’s Henry Jenner, the greatest living expert on the Cornish language. Holmes was able to demonstrate the close connection between the Cornish verb and the Irish verb systems.

The Holmes family were well known in Galway. Indeed, it was Holmes’s uncle, Robert Holmes, the famous Galway barrister and Queen’s Counsel, whom the Irish have to thank for the organization of the Irish National School system for the poorer classes, for he was a member of the Duke of Leinster’s seven-man education commission in the 1830s and 1840s, responsible for many innovative ideas. These few brief words will demonstrate, therefore, the significance of this aide-memoire, which Holmes passed to me in the spring of 1894.

My initial encounter with my second most dangerous adversary happened when I was lunching with my brother, Mycroft, in the Kildare Street Club, in Dublin, during September of 1873. I was barely twenty years old at the time, and thoughts of a possible career as a consulting detective had not yet formulated in my mind. In fact, my mind was fully occupied by the fact that I would momentarily be embarking for England, where I had won a demyship at one of the Oxford Colleges with the grand sum of 95 pounds per annum.

I had won the scholarship having spent my time at Trinity College, Dublin, in the study of chemistry and botany. My knowledge of chemistry owed much to a great Trinity scholar, Maxwell Simpson, whose lectures at the Park Street Medical School advanced my knowledge of organic chemistry considerably. Simpson was the first man to synthesize succinic acid, a dibasic acid obtained by the dry distillation of amber. It was thanks to this great countryman of mine that I had produced a dissertation thought laudable enough to win me the scholarship to Oxford.

Indeed, I was not the only Trinity man to be awarded a demyship to Oxford that year. My friend, Wilde, a brilliant Classicist, a field for which I had no aptitude at all, was also to pursue his education there. Wilde continually berated me for my fascination with sensational literature and one day promised that he would write a horror story about a portrait that would chill even me.