Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“Understood that in her violent madness Alice Rucastle had murdered and partially eaten her two-year-old younger brother Edward?” Holmes asked blandly. “I rather doubt it.”

“Good Lord,” gasped James. “But you knew of this . . . abomination?”

“From the beginning,” said Holmes, no longer smiling. “Far from being a villain seeking an inheritance or whatever twaddle Watson added to distort the tale, the so-called Jephro Rucastle—his real name Jethrow Dawkins—was such an indulgent and loving father that he could not abide the thought of his daughter Alice—the murderer of his only son, the heir of the family name and title—being locked away in a bedlam. Thus the locked wing, the barred door.”

“But if Miss Violet Hunter did not discover these things . . . if she already knew about Alice’s madness, the reason for the locked wing and room . . .”

“It was Peter Fowler, not the harlot Violet Hunter, who insisted on luring the Rucastles into town that March night in eighteen eighty-six,” Holmes said grimly. “He sent us a telegram stating his intentions of ‘saving’ his beloved Alice. I sent him an immediate telegram in return, ordering him not to go anywhere near Hodgkyss Hall—he never received the telegram since he had already left his hotel in Wells—and Watson and I rushed out to Wookey Hole as fast as we could . . .”

“Wookey Hole?” chimed James.

“Yes, of course. Close by the famous caves near Wells in Somerset. ‘Fowler’ was staying in the Wookey Hole Hotel in Wells. Watson’s fictionalized ‘Rucastles’ were actually the well-known Dawkins family. Alice’s father was Jethrow Dawkins, Lord Hodgkyss of Hodgkyss Hall, first cousin to the Vicar of Wookey and so-called ‘Hero of the Transvaal’ in the eighteen eighty-one Boer Rebellion.”

“Even I, a mere American, have heard of the Witch of Wookey Hole,” said James. His voice sounded strange to his own ears. He could not quite believe what he had just said. Henry James, Jr.—like his father Henry James, Sr., and his older brother William—had always had a weakness for ghost stories.

“The Witch of Wookey Hole is a limestone stalagmite that’s been scaring tourists since the sixteen hundreds,” Holmes said in the flattest of tones. “Alice Dawkins was the real-life Monster of Wookey Hole. And only seven years ago.”

Henry James squinted at Holmes. “You said that Peter Fowler was murdered. It was written that Mr. Rucastle—and this Dawkins, Lord Hodgkyss, ‘died violently’. There’s a lot of yet-unexplained mayhem there.”

“We arrived only minutes too late, Watson and I,” Holmes said in a barely audible voice. “Fowler had brought a tall ladder, risked the dangerous traverse across ancient slate tiles in the darkness, and let himself down through the small skylight in Alice’s locked room. She must have sat on the bed in silence and let him unlock her manacles, padlocks, and chains while he whispered endearments. Then she used her teeth and uncut nails to slash his throat. She was eating his heart when Dawkins, her father, rushed in. The ‘Violet Hunter’ hired harlot was close on Dawkins’s heels, and, by pure coincidence, wearing Alice’s blue dress that evening.”

James sat, staring and waiting. Despite the fact that all this had to be pure invention, he found that he had trouble breathing.

“Mr. Dawkins, Lord Hodgkyss, had brought a pistol with him,” continued Holmes in the same flat tones. “He had told me in an interview the week before that he was sure he could never use it on his daughter, no matter what new unspeakable actions she might undertake. He was correct. As Watson and I ran down the dusty hallway and shouted at him, Dawkins raised the pistol to his temple and blew his own brains out.”

“And Miss Violet Hunter?” asked James. “The non-governess governess?”

“Mad,” said Sherlock Holmes. “She began screaming at the sight of what was transpiring in Alice Dawkins’s room and continues to scream to this day, although her asylum care is paid for by Lady Hodgkyss.”

James smiled to show that he was not a total rube. “Rube”—the word came from when a traveling circus had come to the outskirts of Newport when he was young. James hadn’t thought of that word for years; he’d never used it in a story.

“And what about Carlo?” he asked softly.

“Carlo?” said Holmes.

“In ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’, Watson writes about Carlo, the giant baying mastiff that prowled the yard at night and that tore out Mr. Rucastle’s throat in the end.”

Holmes smiled thinly. “ ‘Baying mastiff’. Watson never has been able to tell his Hound Group from his Herding Dogs . . . Watson just doesn’t know dogs. There was a mastiff at Hodgkyss Hall. His name was Barney, he was fifteen years old, and if he’d encountered a burglar in the night, Barney would have rolled over to have his belly rubbed. The only infamy Barney ever committed, according to Jethrow Dawkins when Watson and I spoke to him three days before he died, was when he playfully chewed up one of Lady Hodgkyss’s stuffed animals.”

“But Watson wrote in ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’ that he had to take his service revolver and—I quote—blow the creature’s brains out after it had killed Mr. Rucastle,” said James in a strained voice.

“It was Mr. Dawkins’s revolver, and I used it,” said Holmes. “Alice Dawkins was preoccupied with devouring her father when I took the fallen revolver and blew her brains out.”

The two men sat in silence for several minutes.

Finally Sherlock Holmes—or the man pretending to be the imaginary Sherlock Holmes—said, “I believe I understand why Watson felt he had to write about the Wookey Hole Affair . . . the so-called ‘Adventure of the Copper Beeches’. It haunted him. Bothered his sleep. It’s in Dr. Watson’s nature to try to rearrange things into simpler stories of right and wrong. But if I were he, I would have left the entire Wookey Hole business alone.”

Henry James looked the other man in the eye and said, “You realize, of course, that everything that you’ve told me here sounds absolutely insane.”

“Absolutely,” said Holmes. The detective checked his watch. “John Hay said that a light lunch would be set out in the conservatory dining area at noon and for us to go ahead even if he were still busy. Would you care to join me, Mr. James?”

“I’ll wait until tea with Clarence King and dinner with the Norwegian emissary, Mr. Holmes,” said James. He said nothing else before going back to his room to lie down on the perfectly white bedspread.

Clarence King arrived promptly upon the chime of 5 p.m. A portly 51-year-old now and long past his once athletic, mountain-climbing physical prime, King appeared at the Hays’ threshold wearing a large beret and a well-worn green velvet corduroy suit complete with knee breeches and high wool socks.

“Your old European traveling suit!” cried John Hay, fervently using both hands to shake King’s. “Are you going abroad again?”

“Not unless one counts Mexico as ‘abroad’,” laughed King in a voice Henry James found as velvety as the absurd traveling suit—and just as well-worn. “I found myself traveling through Washington with no other clothes available and knew that my oldest friends would understand this velveteen invasion. Consider it a tardy celebration of St. Patrick’s Day.”

“You could have worn your old cowboy britches and chaps and been dressed perfectly for this home, Clarence,” said Hay, who had already made the dinner less formal by decreeing it only black tie rather than white tie, even with a Norwegian emissary and his wife and daughter attending.