Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

He closed the distance again. “I was going to say that Coriolanus was shaped by warped Roman values,” whispered Sherlock. “That’s always been my understanding of what Shakespeare was trying to say.”

Irene Adler laughed and it was a bitter, sad sound. “Don’t you remember, Sherlock? We met in London during Henry Irving’s troupe’s presentation of Coriolanus . I a veteran of theater playing the old hag Volumnia at the advanced age of twenty-two and you an eighteen-year-old understudy, fleeing your first months of schooling in Cambridge, wet behind the ears and everywhere else.”

“I’ve forgotten everything about the play,” said Holmes. “But remembered every other second of our time together.”

She touched his cheek with the backs of her fingers. “You were so young, my dear.”

Holmes took her in his arms. She seemed to resist for a second or two and then melted into him. Then she set her hand on his chest and firmly pushed him away.

“Now,” she said, “shall we discuss this not-a-game game we find ourselves in?”

Holmes couldn’t speak for a moment and, when he did, his voice was ragged. “All right.”

“What horrible thing first?” She’d obviously meant her tone to be light, but it came out as choked with emotion as Holmes’s voice.

“The annual typed cards on December six,” he said.

He could tell immediately that she had no idea what he was talking about. She was a consummate actress but Holmes now had decades of experience studying liars’ faces and eyes when they lied. She was not faking her lack of understanding.

“What cards? I put flowers on Clover’s grave every December six—white violets, she loved them—and I’ve sent a few flowers to Henry Adams on that date, but I’ve never included a card.”

“Ned Hooper, Clover’s brother, came to see me in London two years ago—he’s dead now, by the way,” said Holmes. “He offered me two thousand dollars and said he wanted me to solve the mystery of a card that each of the four surviving members of the Five of Hearts receives each December six—and has since December ’eighty-six. It’s typed and always says the same thing . . . ‘She was murdered’.”

Irene Adler stared at him. “That’s barbarous. I would never do that. There’d be no reason for Lucan to do that. No, he never would.”

Holmes nodded. “I didn’t think it was either of you but I owe it to Ned’s memory—and the one-dollar retainer he paid me in eighteen ninety-one—to ask.”

“That was the year that the papers said you died,” Irene Adler said quietly. “In Switzerland, while fighting with some Professor Moriarty whom no one had ever heard of.”

Holmes nodded again.

“I didn’t believe it then,” said Adler. “And I didn’t believe it the next year when Lucan bragged that he’d killed you in Tibet.”

Holmes smiled. “He nearly did. He put three rifle bullets through my back at a distance of almost a mile.”

She seemed startled. “I’d always assumed he was lying. How could you survive three strikes like that from the kind of rifles Lucan uses?”

“I don’t know,” said Holmes. “But let’s talk about Rebecca Lorne.” The words clicked into place like the clack-clock of a bolt-action rifle bringing a live round into the chamber. “Was it for blackmail?”

“Of course,” said Adler.

“Why Clover and Henry Adams?”

“They were rich. She was weak. At the time, in eighteen eighty-five, Lucan needed money for what he had to do in Europe. Blackmailing the Adamses was an obvious way. Clover was so lonely and lost that I became her best friend in two days.”

“But you continued the pretense for seven months,” snapped Holmes.

“After the first days, it was no pretense,” Irene Adler said softly. “I did like Clover. I admired her talent—as a person, as a photographer—far more than her arrogant, self-centered husband ever had. He used every possible chance to make her feel . . . less . Less important. Less capable. Less than an equal human being. Have you read his novel Esther that came out not long before she died?”

“Yes,” said Holmes.

“It’s obviously a portrait of her . . . of poor Clover . . . and she’s shown to be foolish and inept in her art, foolish in her life, and always dependent upon some merciful man for anything she might ever need or reach for in her life. If I’d had a husband who wrote a novel like that about me , I would have shot him twice . . . the second bullet to the head to put him out of the misery of where I’d put the first round.”

“Yes,” said Holmes. And smiled this time.

“So you’d asked why I made her a victim,” continued Irene.

Holmes nodded.

“I thought it was the fastest way to get Lucan out of her life,” she said bitterly. “My dear Cousin Clifton. A mere boy.” Her white hands became white fists in the dim light. “A mere boy who was a cancer . . . a cancer which needed thousands of dollars to go back to Europe to murder someone alongside his hero, the great tiger-hunting Colonel Sebastian Moran.”

“How did he . . . Lucan . . . find out about the romantic letter Henry Adams had sent Lizzie Cameron?” asked Holmes. “I presume that was the direction your blackmail took.”

Irene Adler made a noise like a small dog choking. “Of course. That circle of friends was so small and so inbred that even young Lucan knew that there would be scandal just beneath the surface. After I’d become dear friends with Clover, and thus allowed into that tiny little circle of highest-society ladies, Lizzie Cameron herself bragged to me of Henry Adams’s love letter to her. Lucan had said that there must be something, and in the end we didn’t even have to dig. One of Clover’s closest friends—quotation marks all around that phrase—gave us, gave me , the deadly dagger with a laugh.”

“Why did you go with Clover to see Lizzie Cameron on her sickbed thirty-six hours before Clover’s death?” asked Holmes.

“I wanted Lizzie to deny that any such letter existed,” said Adler. “I’d asked her, Lizzie, just hours before, to deny it. She finally said she would.”

“And did she?”

“She wouldn’t. She was ill with the flu and all of her darker humours were in full control of her. She teased poor, silly Clover about the existence of the letter, playing dumb about it one minute, obviously acknowledging its existence the next. I almost strangled the woman in her four-posted silken-canopied bed. Clover went home that night certain that she’d so failed her husband Henry—at being his real wife as she always put it, she was terrified of sexual intercourse, you see, it was always strange and painful to her—that she decided that everything, including her husband’s cheating attentions to Lizzie Cameron, was her fault.”

“I can’t see how driving Clover Adams to suicide could help Lucan or you in any way,” said Holmes. “That’s always been the sticking point of this conundrum.”

“Not a very complicated one,” said Adler. “Lucan had found other funding for his list of assassinations. Steady funding. Funding he has even today. He no longer had to wait for a neurotic woman to help us blackmail her husband.”

“Did Lucan poison Clover Adams?” asked Holmes.

The long silence seemed to make the gathering darkness deeper.

“I don’t know,” said Irene Adler at last. “I know he brought the poison to her bedroom that Sunday morning . . . and the glass from downstairs. Suspecting that he would try something to get rid of her—she knew ‘Cousin Clifton’ too well to be on her guard—I rushed to her house that morning. But she was already dead on the floor. I heard footsteps on the servants’ stairs—Lucan leaving, I believe—but somehow I don’t think he forced the poison down her throat. Or even allowed her to see him, for that matter. It was just the bottle of potassium cyanide that had strangely moved from her photographic laboratory and the mysterious appearance of that single drinking glass that sent her off the edge. Perhaps she took it as a message from her husband . . . or God.” After another silence, “But I was still as complicit in Clover Adams’s death as Lucan was, whatever he did or didn’t do. I even took the glass away in my handbag before I went down to meet Henry Adams returning from his walk.”