Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

James felt something like panic pluck at him. The other man was deranged. And he might well be dangerous —a physical threat to James even at this moment.

“Oh, I think not dangerous,” said Holmes, puffing away again. “Not to you, at least, Mr. James.”

It was as if he’d plucked the author’s thoughts out of the air.

“What did you think of Watson’s . . . stories?” asked Holmes, closing the book and setting it on the table next to James.

“They’re absurd.”

Holmes laughed again. “Yes, they are, aren’t they? Poor Watson works so hard to bring the rough notes of his chronicles up to Conan Doyle’s literary standards, but I doubt if either man understands how the reality of my cases could ever really be translated into any work of art. You see, James, the better cases already are works of art—without the melodrama and fictional trappings.”

“So you admit that these stories are inferior literary efforts,” managed James. “Mere overwrought . . . romances.”

Holmes winced at the last word but sounded amiable enough as he said, “Absolutely, my dear chap.” He opened the book again. “I see that Watson included the tale he called ‘The Copper Beeches’. Shall we just take that as an example of literary failure?”

“I already have taken it as such,” said James.

“As well you should,” said Holmes, prodding the stem of his pipe in James’s direction. “I ask you . . . does it make any sense whatsoever that this . . .” He had to fan through pages and glance down at the story. “That this Violet Hunter person should come to our apartment and take up our time, Watson’s and mine, asking advice on whether she take some dreary governess position in the country? No matter how odd her employer’s requirements might have been, I mean. And does it make sense that I would waste my time listening to such a plea for advice . . . unnecessary advice, since you may have noticed that the baggage had already made up her mind about taking the position.”

“Total nonsense,” said James. He felt a sense of oddness verging on vertigo that he was agreeing with Holmes. Or vice versa.

“This ‘Violet Hunter’—that wasn’t the wench’s real name, of course—was not my client.”

“No?” James would have called back the syllable if he’d been able to.

“No. Our client—the person in need of help who showed up on this cold day in early March of eighteen eighty-six—was the ‘Mr. Fowler’ to whom Watson refers, but who is never directly introduced to the reader.”

“Mr. Fowler?” repeated James, despite himself. “The imprisoned Alice Rucastle’s fiancé? The man in the mirror? The one whom Dr. Watson informs us ends up marrying the liberated Miss Rucastle and moves with her to Mauritius?”

Holmes grinned around the pipe in a way that looked almost evil. “Precisely,” he said. “Although ‘Mr. Fowler’—I shall call him Peter since that was the gentleman’s real first name—did not, as it turned out, marry the liberated and enriched Miss Alice Rucastle and . . . how did Watson put it?” He flipped pages. “Oh, yes . . . become ‘the holder of a Government appointment in the Island of Mauritius.’ ”

“Is any of this relevant or of any importance whatsoever to your fraudulent representation of yourself as Sherlock Holmes?” asked James.

“Only if you wish to understand the wide gap between this . . . fictional . . . Sherlock Holmes’s life and his reported adventures ,” said Holmes.

“I see no purpose to discussing either,” said Henry James.

Holmes nodded in agreement but removed the pipe and began speaking in slow, low tones.

“Peter . . . Fowler . . . came to see Dr. Watson and me in March of eighteen eighty-eight. His problem was a domestic one, yes, but one which I thought at the time might serve my need to some true detection. In the end, you see, James, ‘Mr. Fowler’—who was a very nice London gentleman, by the by—did not marry Miss Alice Rucastle and live happily ever after. The truth of the matter . . . the sort of truth that Watson so frequently works so hard to avoid . . . was that his former fiancée, Alice Rucastle, tore Fowler’s throat out with her teeth. She murdered him.”

“Good God,” breathed James.

“Mr. Fowler came to me because he’d been happily engaged to Alice Rucastle . . . Watson’s clumsy choice of a name, of course . . . until what Fowler had referred to as his fiancée’s ‘pleasant if frequent flightiness’ had turned into a severe brain fever . . . whatever ‘brain fever’ might actually be. Watson, like most medicos in our benighted era, swears by ‘brain fever’, but not one doctor in a thousand can describe its cause or cure.”

“But Miss Rucastle . . . whatever her real name might be . . . did have it?” asked James. His weakness for hearing bizarre stories was almost the equal of his penchant for writing them.

“She had it . . . but her infant younger brother, Edward, was the one who died from it,” said Holmes.

“Edward,” repeated James. He remembered the moths circling the lamp late the night before as he approached sleep and the end of the collection of tales. “The little boy with evil behavior and the oversized head. The object of Miss Violet Hunter’s efforts of instruction as a governess.”

Holmes laughed again. “Miss Violet Hunter was not hired as a governess. Baby Edward had been murdered by the time Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle hired her . . . and they hired her only to impersonate their imprisoned daughter Alice.”

“Wait,” said Henry James, holding up one well-manicured hand. “You’re saying that Violet Hunter, by any other name, knew from the start that she had no duty except to impersonate the imprisoned daughter of the Rucastles? Mr. Fowler’s fiancée?”

“That’s precisely what I am saying, James.” Holmes stared out the window at leaf-shadows on St. John’s across the street. “ ‘Violet Hunter’ was nothing more than a woman of the streets . . . in company, she could not have impersonated even so lowly a lady as a governess. Mr. ‘Jephro Rucastle’—who, by the by, was no villain as Watson re-created it but who also was soon to die violently—made it clear to the London wench from the first that she would be paid thirty pounds a month—not a quarter as Watson’s re-telling has it—thirty pounds a month just to cut her hair as Alice’s had been cut during her terrible illness, to wear Alice’s blue dress, to sit in the window where Peter Fowler could, from behind her and from a distance, see her laughing and evidently recovered from her madness.”

“Her madness? ” gasped James.

“Oh, yes. I forgot to put that little fact in sequence, didn’t I? This is why Watson says that I must never write up my own adventures. When Alice’s father—Alice was her real Christian name, by the way—when her father realized that she would never regain her sanity, he wrote to Peter Fowler in a poor imitation of his daughter’s hand to break off their engagement. But Fowler never believed that the letter was from Alice.”

“Alice Rucastle was mad?”

“As a hatter,” said Holmes with absolutely no tone of sympathy in his voice. “It had manifested itself in sly and then secret but serious ways for years, but during the winter of her engagement to Peter Fowler—a marriage which her parents did not know of and would never have allowed since the insanity was hereditary—the worsening illness led first to the fits, then to the seizures, and finally to the violent behavior that the Rucastles reported to Fowler and the world as ‘brain fever’.”

“But surely Mr. Fowler would have understood,” said James. He tried to imagine writing this tale himself, but failed. It was too sensationalist. Too much the fever-dream territory of a contemporary Wilkie Collins.