Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Henry James had lived in England long enough to know that this was pure twaddle. There were certainly instances of crime and domestic brutality in any picturesque village or cottage, but none of the wanton crime, neglect, and lack of law that Holmes here states—absurdly—would be so quickly reported and corrected, with punishment invariably handed out, in the slums and tenements of London. Indeed, the cruelty of Henry James’s favorite city was known to all of its urban inhabitants.

What struck Henry James in this silly outburst of the literary Sherlock Holmes was twofold:

First, it was not an English attitude about the city versus country. In fact, it was decidedly “un-English”. French, perhaps, Russian, possibly, but never English.

Second, James could all but hear his brother William’s strong voice saying—“This is a sort of confession from the man’s own background, Harry. A psychological plea for help and understanding. Something very dark and painful happened to this man in the country sometime in his past—a countryside he was not used to, being a former city slum-dweller perhaps—and his subconscious now loathes and fears the very idea of bucolic quiet and those stretches of peaceful darkness between the country homes and cottages. It would be very interesting to explore the basis for this man’s deep fears.”

Henry James occasionally lectured on great writers, but should he ever give a symposium on Ludicrous Writing, he would use as his text the rest of “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”:

Miss Hunter—her hair now cropped short in a way that reminded James, with a pang, of his teenaged cousin, now deceased, Minnie Temple posing as Hamlet for them after a serious illness had caused her hair to be roughly shorn—meets Holmes and Watson at the Black Swan Hotel (evidently she is a governess who has no problem leaving her young charge, the Rucastles’ only child—a son, Edward, described only as having “a huge and oversized head” and of being “evil”—at any time of the day or night).

Indeed, other than her ascertaining that the odd-looking boy is evil, there is no mention of Miss Hunter’s governess duties or interactions with the boy. The Rucastles have informed Violet Hunter that their daughter—who looked very much like Violet Hunter—had died of “brain fever” (which was the reason for the daughter’s shortened hair), and now Hunter informs a solicitous Holmes and Watson that she has been made to sit in front of a bow window (with her back to the window, of course) in the dead daughter’s dress and laugh aloud at Mr. Rucastle’s endless trove of amusing anecdotes. When Violet secreted a small mirror into her handkerchief to look out the window behind her, she saw a young man standing at the fence to the property, staring intently at her back. But the humorless Mrs. Rucastle noticed the mirror, exclaimed that there was an intruder on the property, and demanded that Violet wave him away before they immediately lowered the blinds. Miss Hunter then easily unlocks a “locked drawer” in a chest of drawers in her room and finds a coil of hair that has precisely the color and texture of her own when it had been long.

As established forever in such gothic tales as Jane Eyre , there was the inevitable locked room—in fact, an entire locked wing—which Miss Violet Hunter was told to avoid. Naturally, she soon finds a key (inevitably, conveniently) left in the lock there and explores the empty, dusty wing . . . empty save for one room which is also locked, with the iron headboard from a bed used as bars across it. She does not have time to go inside.

Mr. Rucastle almost immediately learns of her transgression and threatens to feed her to the large mastiff, called Carlo, that he orders the single manservant, named Toller, to loose from the kennel to prowl the grounds at night. Toller, it seems, has drunk himself into oblivion that very afternoon. Holmes immediately announces that she must lock Mrs. Toller in the cellar that evening and that he and Dr. Watson, carrying his trusty service revolver, will be at Copper Beeches at seven p.m.

Holmes has stated that it is obvious that Mr. Rucastle has imprisoned his still-living daughter—Judy—in the locked room for some nefarious reason, probably about an inheritance he wants to control, and the three adventurers have soon broken through the locks and bedstead grille and flung open the door, only to find . . .

“It was empty. There was no furniture save a little pallet bed, a small table, and a basketful of linen. The skylight above was open, and the prisoner gone.

“ ‘There has been some villainy here,’ said Holmes; ‘this beauty has guessed Miss Hunter’s intentions, and has carried his victim off.’

“ ‘But how?’

“ ‘Through the skylight. We shall soon see how he managed it.’ He swung himself up onto the roof. ‘Ah, yes,’ he cried, ‘Here’s the end of a long light ladder against the eaves. That is how he did it.’

“ ‘But it is impossible,’ said Miss Hunter. ‘The ladder was not there when the Rucastles went away.’

“ ‘He has come back and done it. I tell you that he is a clever and dangerous man . . . ’ ”

Here Henry James cannot resist the soft laughter that overcame him. “A clever and dangerous man . . .” who for some reason found it necessary to bring a tall ladder to his own home, cross the roof, and drop through a skylight to retrieve a young woman from a room to which he had the keys and could easily unlock and walk in—and take his daughter out the normal way should he need to—any time he chose. This was typical of Holmes’s “deductions” and—James thought—it was typically asinine.

The end of the story was almost apologetically pro forma: Rucastle appears: “You villain!” cries Holmes. “Where is your daughter?” Then Rucastle rushes out to free Carlo, the giant mastiff, who we know from Mr. Toller’s two days of reported drunkenness—has not been fed for two days. Our trio hears “the baying of a hound”—another authorial idiocy, James notes tiredly. Although Henry James prefers small dogs, lap dogs suitable for parlors, such as dachshunds, he’s been around all breeds of dogs enough at other people’s country homes to know that mastiffs—which are usually quite gentle around people—are incapable of “baying”. Growling, perhaps. Roaring from the chest when threatened, perhaps. But baying, never. That ability to “bay” belongs to the “hounds” group of canines—and a mastiff is not a hound.

At any rate, Carlo chews out Mr. Rucastle’s throat, Dr. Watson with his trusty service revolver “blew its brains out” (but too late, alas!), and a suddenly helpful Mrs. Toller explains the entire plot, the need for Rucastle to fake his daughter Judy’s death (for inheritance reasons!) and hide her away in the locked wing, and the whole pantomime of Violet Hunter being made to impersonate Judy so that the daughter’s persistent fiancé (a “Mr. Fowler” whom Violet Hunter glimpsed in her mirror) will give up, accept Judy’s death, and go away.

In one final paragraph all the loose ends are tied and tidied up—we never meet Judy or Mr. Fowler, but hear from the narrator that they were married and that the lucky groom is now “the holder of a Government appointment in the Island of Mauritius”, and that Miss Violet Hunter has gone on (perhaps with the help of Sherlock Holmes?) to be “the head of a private school at Walsatt”. (A rather good job for a young woman with no real references who admitted in the story that she had as skills “only a little music, a tiny bit of French and German”.)

Henry James, setting the finished book on his bedside table, again has to press his knuckles against his lips lest an audible laugh escape.