George Mann - Associates of Sherlock Holmes

Sent: 4th January 1913

From: Panjandrum

To: Scheherazade

Proposition accepted and subject gladly lulled. Suite in the Bostonian to be prepared for 6th January.

Sent: 4th January 1913

From: Scheherazade

To: Panjandrum

Congratulations. You are indeed a patriot. Report to me again in London.

I have spent today in preparation, not only of the practical kind – baggage to be packed; Mrs Scott to be informed and appraised of my imminent absence; arrangements to be set in motion for the temporary shutting up of the house – but also of an emotional, one might almost say spiritual, sort.

There are parts of my soul that have long been left unvisited and it was to those that I tended this afternoon. Shortly before dusk I took a walk, as I have so often before, into those patches of woodland which abut this little village and there I took a moment to stand alone, to collect my thoughts, to reflect upon the errors of my personal history and – I do not flinch from such an admission – for the first time in far too many years, to pray. For an instant or two, I was lost in the gathering evening to something far greater than myself.

Then I awakened from my reverie, turned and hurried back to my isolated little home. Such higher thoughts I leave here in the fens. In London I shall be all of the body – a corporeal and not a sacred being, devoted no longer to penitence but rather, I fancy, to the furtherance of sin.

I write these words upon the train to the metropolis, the details of my long exile fading already into disagreeable memory. I think now only of what is ahead of me: of the Bostonian Hotel, of the rich and subtle pleasures of the city, of my particular appetites – for too long in abeyance – and of Miss Lowenstein’s white beguiling smile.

Telegram

Sent: 6th January 1913

From: Scheherazade

To: Panjandrum

Subject arrived safely. Eager to commence first stage. Cannot recall an easier corruption. Request, as discussed, immediate release of funds.

Telegram

Sent: 6th January 1913

From: Panjandrum

To: Scheherazade

Request accepted. Funds to be delivered in customary fashion. Thoughts of all the Service are with you.

Telegram

Sent: 7th January 1913

From: Scheherazade

To: Panjandrum

We have him. Ready to begin second stage.

You will forgive my absence from these pages in recent days. I have been engaged in alternative pursuits. I dare not provide complete details of my excursions even here. Let it suffice to report that the pleasure gardens of London are aptly named, that the diversions of Bloomsbury are various and plentiful, and that there is in this mighty capital no hunger that might not be anticipated, that might not be met with expertise and surpassed. To this I must add that Miss Lowenstein has proved to be an excellent and knowledgeable guide. It is difficult to imagine any father having been precisely proud of such a daughter but it is surely to be hoped that he might at least have respected her comfortable acceptance of her nature.

The two days that I have spent here, in this marvellous hotel, have been unusually pleasant ones, unparalleled in the great majority of my adult life. Yet I am no longer a young man. I have not the vigour of my former days. I grow tired and I grow stale and I recollect the words of the Bard when he wrote of that rambunctious trickster that desire should so many years outlive performance. I had accepted the truth of the matter – that this delightful and unexpected sojourn had come to its natural conclusion, that my spirits were truly spent and that I would shortly have to contemplate a return to Cambridgeshire. Certainly, I considered any debt that might have been owed to me by the Family Lowenstein to have been paid in full and with considerable interest.

It was with no small quantity of surprise, then, that I woke from a stupor this afternoon to discover that notable lady sitting at the foot of my bed with a small wooden box before her. I struggled upright and asked Scheherazade what it was that had brought her to my chamber in so unorthodox a fashion.

Her reply, at first, was perhaps a little cryptic. “I see you,” she said. “And I know you also.”

“Whatever do you mean by that, my dear?”

“Only this: that you wish, do you not, to stay? Here in Bloomsbury? That there are depths for you to plumb? Blank spaces on the map still to be charted? Fabulous, fertile islands to be colonised and made your own?”

I swallowed deep and hard at this but made the inevitable protestation. “I am old, my dear, simply too old and too weak.”

“Truly,” she said, “it is not so. You are familiar, I know, with the contents of this box?”

I craned my neck forward to see what lay within, although I do believe I already knew what I would find there.

A set of full phials. A hypodermic already prepared.

The lady’s voice was gentle but firm. “I have continued my father’s work. The serum has been intensified and improved. You would surely appreciate the artistry of the thing. You will reap – oh, shall you reap – such benefits.”

“The side effects,” I stuttered. “The things before, the things it made me do…”

“All gone now. It has been improved upon. There is nothing that this could make you do that you did not wish to do. The serum would be to you a tyrant no longer but rather a most willing and most biddable accomplice.”

“I… dare not…”

“You?” Scheherazade opened her eyes improbably wide, in near-pantomimic shock. “How could you of all people use such a word? I thought you fearless, Professor. Fearless!”

I bowed my head to demonstrate that I felt appropriately shamed.

“Please,” she said. “This is my present to you. My final gift. And so I ask once more, Professor Presbury, sir, will you take this serum?”

And, of course, I nodded and I said that I would, and I reached out for the tools of vigour and strength and newfound youth. And I have begun – so I happily suppose – the final tranche of this, my most pleasurable damnation.

Sent: 9th January 1913

From: Scheherazade

To: Panjandrum

Study proceeds apace. Subject a willing participant. Earliest results expected within hours.

It is often said, at least by certain worthies, that it is the youth of our present time to whom we must look for demonstrations of dissolute and impious behaviour. The events that took place last night towards the southernmost end of Dean Street would seem to stand in ironical rebuke of so conventional a suggestion.

Shortly after midnight besides a nest of lodging-houses of the most disagreeable sort, a minor conflagration was seen to begin, as well as a great deal of commotion. In particular, a flurry of coarse and violent language was heard from he who was subsequently found to be the source of the blaze, a gentleman who was also in pursuit of a very young woman, busily engaged in chasing her along the avenue. The scene was said to resemble some antique woodcutting or portrait from some latter-day Rake’s Progress.