Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Holmes found what he wanted near the southwest edge of Foggy Bottom: five rotting, peeling, once middle-class homes standing amidst high weeds on an otherwise abandoned block.

He chose his house carefully, walked around the back, and tested the still-intact rear door. It was locked. These homes were almost certainly for sale, although their former owners and current sales agents were living in a fantasy world if they thought anyone would buy them now for purposes of residence.

Using the small jimmy-tools from his folded leather purse, Holmes let himself in and wandered through the chilly rooms where wallpaper, once eagerly chosen with hope in some long-failed domestic future, peeled away from clammy walls like skin from a corpse.

Upstairs he found what he’d sought: a locked closet. Holmes jimmied it open, undid the clasp of his bulging briefcase, and brought out a change of clothes. When he was completely changed, down to his underlinens, Holmes folded his good tweed “Norwegian suit”, shirt, shoes, and underclothes into the briefcase, set the briefcase on the high shelf of the otherwise empty closet, and used his tools to lock the warped door once again.

There was no mirror left intact in the old house but it had grown dark enough out under the advancing storm that Holmes could check his appearance in one of the long windows in an empty upstairs room.

He was now a grubby American laborer—down to the thick boots and soiled Irish cap—complete with dirty waistcoat and baggy trousers held up with one suspender. He’d applied make-up to approximate months of grime to his face and hands and nails. Holmes allowed his hair to fall from beneath his foul cap at random, greasy angles and now even his carefully trimmed Norwegian-explorer’s mustache had been augmented into an overgrown American’s soup-strainer. Even his fancy cane, the outer sheath slid away, was now a rough walking stick with a lump of brass rather than sculpted silver at its head. Unless someone hefted that stick, they wouldn’t guess that it had a core of lead poured down its center and a solid lead sphere centered under the wood in the rough knob at the top. He still carried the French gravity blade in the pocket of his working-man’s trousers and kept the three photographs tucked securely in his shirt pocket.

Holmes went out of the old house, locked it behind him, and walked south toward the Southwest slums he sought, his stout stick banging against tilted sidewalk pavers and rough cobblestones as he went.

No trace of either the Norwegian gentleman he was currently passing as or the English gentleman he’d so long passed as was left as he walked the rough, dangerous streets of southwest Washington, D.C. His “disguise” as an unemployed, rum-reeking common American laborer did not feel strange on him. He had been pretending to be an English gentleman all of his adult life and sometimes the pretense grew wearisome indeed.

In the century and more to come from this moment in March of 1893, there will be multiple biographies written about Sherlock Holmes. Most will get his birth year—1854—correct. Most will write about how he and his older brother Mycroft came from landed gentry in Yorkshire. They will tell of his youthful education in a Yorkshire manor and his years at Cambridge. Almost all of these facts—after the year of his birth—will be incorrect.

Everything that future biographers—speculators—of Sherlock Holmes’s past assume as true comes from a few words quoted by Dr. John Watson and published in The Strand in a tale titled “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter”. The conversation between the doctor and the detective that particular lazy summer-evening had been running in its “desultory, spasmodic fashion from golf clubs to the causes of the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic” (note here that if Holmes had really not known that the earth orbited the sun, he hardly could have been chatting about the “obliquity of the ecliptic”) when Watson changed the topic to “hereditary aptitudes”. The point under discussion , Watson reported in his chronicle, was how far any singular gift in an individual was due to his ancestry, and how far to his own early training . In today’s parlance, it was a discussion about nature versus nurture.

Then Watson went on with his fateful four paragraphs:

“ ‘In your own case,’ said I, ‘from all that you have told me it seems obvious that your faculty of observation and your peculiar facility for deduction are due to your own training.’

“ ‘To some extent,’ he [Holmes] answered thoughtfully. ‘My ancestors were country squires, who appear to have led much the same life, as is natural to their class. But, nonetheless, my turn that way is in my veins, and may have come with my grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist. Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.’

“ ‘But how do you know that it is hereditary?’

“ ‘Because my brother Mycroft possesses it in a larger degree than I do.’ ”

This was the only time, in hundreds of thousands of words “chronicled by Watson”, that Holmes will ever mention his ancestors. It was the first time he ever mentioned the existence of his brother Mycroft, and Watson was duly astonished.

Yet nothing in this short “revelation” to Dr. Watson by Sherlock Holmes, other than Mycroft’s existence, was true in any real sense: not even the simple fact of his “grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist”.

There was, of course, a well-known French artist of the era, Émile Jean-Horace Vernet (1789–1863), whose specialty was painting scenes of battle and Orientalist-Arab subjects. Vernet’s most-remembered painting in Holmes’s and Watson’s time (and in ours) was his large canvas titled Street Fighting on Rue Soufflot, Paris, June 25, 1848 . If Vernet is remembered for any utterance today it is from the time when a patron asked him to remove the image of an especially obnoxious general from one of his battle paintings. “I am a painter of history, sire,” Vernet is reported to have said, “and I will not violate the truth.”

But Holmes, in his recitation to Watson, certainly violated the truth; Émile Jean-Horace Vernet had three brothers and one younger sister who died of typhus when she was 7 years old. She could hardly have been Sherlock Holmes’s grandmother.

William Sherlock Holmes had been born in the Eastside slums of London and had spent the majority of his young years in those slums and on those rough streets. When the older Holmes summoned his barefoot, ragamuffin group of “street Arabs”—his Baker Street Irregulars, as he called them—he might as well have been summoning his much-younger self.

Future biographers will state with certainty, among other “known facts”, that Holmes’s father was either an invalided-out cavalry lieutenant named Siger Holmes or a member of the landed gentry named William Scott Holmes. Neither account has an ounce of truth to it. One famous biography of the Great Detective will have Sherlock’s father and the Holmes family inheriting a Yorkshire estate called “Mycroft” and will trace the family ownership of that grand estate back to the 1550’s.

This is nonsense and wholly manufactured. Holmes’s actual family once had partial claim to some acres of land in Yorkshire, but it was a non-producing hardscrabble farm during Queen Elizabeth’s reign and had been under the mere hired-management of Sherlock’s uncle for only a few years when that man died in 1860, two years after Sherlock’s mother—of whom the adult detective had no clear memory—died of consumption in an Eastcheap boarding house.

It’s true that the Yorkshire farm once had held some delusions of grandeur. In the sixteenth century the nobleman owner—who was not an ancestor of Sherlock Holmes—had begun work on a grand country house there that was to be known as “Ashcroft Manor”. But the nobleman had made the mistake of remaining a practicing Catholic when England had been converted, forcibly when necessary, to the Church of England, and by 1610 “Ashcroft Manor” had been burned to ashes and equally vanished were the fortune and hopes of the noble squire who had so briefly owned the land. History reports that the lord cut his own throat; he had no male descendants who lived beyond the age of 11.