Holmes for the Holidays Read online

  We were, all three of us, torn between horror and compassion. She gave us a thin smile. 'It was Minnie who saved my reason; I had to remain sane in order to protect her. In order to thwart him, at least temporarily, I moved her bedroom to one which could be approached only through another, and there I installed her old nurse—'

  Daw had had enough. 'Why didn't you tell me?' he protested.

  'You would have ... confronted him.' The hesitation did not escape me. Daw would have killed the devil.

  'Certainly I needed a friend,' Mrs Aubrey conceded. 'Nurse was too old, your emotions would impede your actions, Clement, moreover you could never dissemble. I needed a woman, one who was strong and clever and whom I could trust with my life. I went to Rosie Yewdale.'

  'But she—how could you do that?'

  'I said Aubrey was not interested in women except as mothers and procurers. Rosie loves children and, despite the disapproval of the village women, there are often children about her cottage. Aubrey had visited her, no doubt as part of the facade he presented to the world: that of the incorrigible rake, but his ulterior motive would be the children at that isolated cottage.' She shuddered, then pulled herself together and continued. 'Rosie did not believe my story so I told her that next time Aubrey visited her and his perceptions became clouded by drink, she was to steer him to the subject of children and mark what he said. A week later she came to me and asked what I would have her do.'

  'What had he told her?' Daw was belligerent.

  'I shall not tell you, nor anyone else.'

  Holmes asked, 'What was Aubrey's reaction afterwards, when he realised he had betrayed himself to Rosie?'

  'I said she was clever. He thought he had found an ally. Later, when he received a note asking him to meet her at the cabin, he went. The note said it had to be the cabin because she had taken a lodger. It also said they would discuss "the matter". The implication was that she was about to assist him in ... what he did.'

  'What did he take to the cabin?' Holmes asked.

  She shrugged as if, on the threshold of her story's climax, she had lost interest. 'I did not see him leave. Minnie had a fever and I spent the evening and night at her bedside.'

  'No matter. Rosie will tell us.'

  'She did not go to the cabin either.'

  'She implied to us that she did.'

  'And retracted subsequently. In the first place she was protecting me because she thought it was I who went to the cabin— because it was I who directed her to send him the note and I who told her not to go. She retracted when she learned that I had not gone after all.'

  You had intended to meet him there?'

  'I intended to be on top of the crags as he passed close to the edge. Yes, sir, I planned to kill my husband. I had gone to the cabin when Nurse and Minnie were helping to bring home the Yule log. I set the scene with champagne and the pie, and disordered the bed. I had told Rosie to entertain several men that evening and to make certain that one of them stayed the whole night.'

  'Where did Rosie obtain the mutton and the brandy?' Holmes answered his own question: 'From you, of course.'

  She nodded. 'So when he failed to return to Swithins, Rosie thought that I was responsible—and in a manner I was. I had arranged for him to be up there: at night, the path sheeted with ice, and himself far from sober, for he never spared the wine at dinner.' She stopped and leaned back in her chair, exhausted.

  'An appalling story, madam; you have suffered beyond endurance. Fortunately none of us is called upon to pass judgement on your intentions to bring about his downfall because they failed?' There was the slightest question in his tone. 'He died by accident.'

  It was four o'clock when we climbed the stair again. Daw was escorting Mrs Aubrey back to Swithins. She had insisted on returning; Minnie would wake early on Christmas morning. Outside our rooms I leaned against the wall, stupefied with weariness. 'I would say it was less of an accident than divine retribution,' I said.

  My companion studied me, the candle flames flickering in a vagrant draught, then he turned, his hand to the latch.

  'Holmes!'

  'What is it, Watson?'

  'You are not satisfied.'

  'I am indeed.'

  'It was an accident?'

  'It was murder. The man was pushed.'

  'Then which one? Rosie or the lady?'

  'Or one of their alibis: the old nurse, the drunken groom in Rosie's bed? Not him; they would never trust a man. But the nurse was not drunk and she was wakeful. The lady, the nurse and the whore. There can be only one force more dangerous than a woman, Watson, and that is several of them working in league and all morally certain that they are in the right.'

  'I believe they were.'

  He nodded gravely. 'I agree with you, but would you—would I—have the courage to translate our belief into action? They live by a different code; can you imagine what they might demonstrate if they were criminal?'

  The Adventure of the Three Ghosts

  Loren D. Estleman

  Compliments of the season, Watson. I note Lady Featherstone retains her childhood infatuation with you. She thinks you twelve feet tall and two yards wide at the shoulders."

  Scarcely had I entered the ground floor at 221 Baker Street and surrendered my outerwear to the redoubtable Mrs. Hudson when I was thus greeted by Sherlock Holmes, who stood upon the landing outside the flat we shared for so long. He wore his prized old mouse-coloured dressing-gown, and his eyes were brighter than usual.

  "Good Lord, Holmes," said I, climbing the stairs. "How could you know I saw Constance Featherstone this morning? Her invitation to breakfast was the first contact I have had with her since the wedding."

  "You forget, dear fellow, that I know your wardrobe as well as your wife does. I can hardly be expected not to notice a new muffler, particularly when it bears the Dornoch tartan. You told me once in a loquacious humour of your early romance with Constance Dornoch. Who but she would present you with such a token in honour of the holiday? And who but a sentimental lady who still thought you taller and broader than the common breed of man would knit one so long and bulky that it wound five times round your not inconsiderable neck and stood out like the oaken collar of a Mongolian slave?"

  I simply shook my head, for to remark upon my friend's preternatural powers of observation and deduction would be merely to repeat myself for the thousandth time. Ensconced presently in my old armchair in the dear old cluttered sitting-room I knew so well, I accepted a glass of whisky to draw the December chill from my bones and enquired what he was up to at present.

  "Your timing is opportune," said he, folding his long limbs into the basket chair, where with his hands resting upon his knees he bore no small resemblance to an East Indian shaman. "In ten minutes I shall hail a hansom to carry me to an address on Thread-needle Street, where I fully expect my fare to be paid by the Earl of Chislehurst."

  I nodded, not greatly impressed, although Lord Chislehurst was a respected Member of Parliament and a frequent weekend guest at Balmoral and whispered about as the Queen's favoured candidate for Minister of Finance. In the hierarchy of Holmes's clients, which had included a pontiff, a Prime Minister of England, and a foreign king, a noble banker placed fairly low. "A problem involving money?" I asked.

  "No, a haunting. Are you interested?"

  I responded that I most certainly was; and ten minutes later, my friend having exchanged his dressing-gown for an ulster, warm woollen muffler, and his favourite earflapped travelling cap, we were in a hansom rolling and sliding over the icy pavement through a gentle fall of snow. Vendors were hawking roast chestnuts, and over everything, the grim grey buildings and the holiday shoppers hurrying to and fro, bearing armloads of brightly wrapped packages, there had settled a festive atmosphere which transformed our dreary old London into a magical kingdom. In two days it would be gone, along with Christmas itself, but for the moment it lightened the heart and gilded it with hope.

  "The earl is not a fanciful man," expl
ained Holmes, holding on to the side of the conveyance. "A decade ago he acquired a money-lending institution teetering on the precipice of ruin and within a few short years brought it to the point where it is now universally thought of as one of the ten or twelve most reliable banking firms in England. Such men do not take lightly to ghosts."

  I could divine no more detail than this, as very soon we pulled up before a gloomy old pile which I suspected had shown no great ceremony in its construction under George III, and to which the lapse of nearly a century and a half had brought little in the way of dignity or character. It seemed a most unlikely shelter for the institution Holmes had described.

  Lord Chislehurst, to whom we were shown by a distracted young clerk, ameliorated to a great extent this disappointing impression. Well along in his fifties, he had yet a youthful abundance of fair hair, with but a trace of grey in the side whiskers and the gracefully swelling abdomen that instilled confidence in those who would trust their fortunes to the care of one so well fed, contained in a grey waistcoat and black frock. His broad face was flushed and his manner cordial as he exhorted us to make ourselves comfortable in a pair of deep leather chairs facing his great desk. I noticed as he made his way round to his own seat that he walked with a pronounced limp.

  "I am doubly honoured. Dr. Watson, to welcome you to my place of business," said he, leaning back and threading his fingers together across his middle. "I have read your published accounts of Mr. Holmes's cases with a great deal of interest. As a writer, you may be intrigued to learn that my father toiled for many years as a clerk in the counting-house you came through just now."

  "You have done well for yourself," I said truthfully.

  "So my father might say. Despite the hardship, he was a jovial man, and would laugh long and loud to see his youngest child making free with the cigars in this office." He helped himself to one from a cherrywood box upon the desk and proffered the box, but we declined.

  "Hardship?" prompted Holmes.

  "The former owner was a fierce old dragon in his time, and pinched the halfpenny till it shrieked. Changed quite a bit in his last years, though, I'll be bound; saw the light, I suspect, as Judgement neared. His generosity to his employees after that made it possible for Father to arrange an operation that saved my life. I was a sickly child—a cripple, in fact. Unfortunately, the old banker overdid it, and wound up sacrificing those same sound business principles that made him wealthy. His fortunes declined even as mine ascended. He died in debt, and I acquired the firm the very week I entered the Peerage."

  Holmes lit a cigarette. "An inspiring story. Your Lordship. Your letter—"

  "The tea is not always sweet," he interrupted. "I had hoped to move the offices to more suitable quarters down the street next spring, but this South African mess has got all our foreign securities tied up. Against my better judgement, I have been forced to cancel this year's employee gratuities."

  "Your letter mentioned a ghost."

  "Three ghosts, Mr. Holmes. As if one were not sufficient." Our host's genial smile had vanished. "I have been visited by them the past two nights, and I must say it's getting to be a dashed nuisance."

  "What happened the first night?"

  "I was not greatly alarmed by it, thinking the business a bad dream caused by exhaustion and overindulgence. That day had been long and frustrating, beginning with more bad news from Africa in the Times, and complicated by a discrepancy in the accounts totalling forty-two pounds, which required that the transactions of the entire week be gone over with a weather eye by everyone on the staff. When the error was finally discovered and the correction made, the hour was well past seven. As is my wont, I stopped at the tavern round the corner on my way home, where I confess I had rather more than my customary tot of sherry. My wife, recognising my condition at the door, put me to bed straightaway.

  "I slept as one dead until the stroke of one, at which time I awoke, or thought I awoke, with the realisation that I was not alone in my chamber."

  "One moment," interrupted Holmes. "You do not share sleeping quarters with your wife?"

  "Not since the early months of our marriage. I often sleep fitfully, with much tossing and muttering, and my wife is a light sleeper. I prefer not to disturb her. Is it significant?"

  "Perhaps not. Please proceed."

  " 'Who is there?' I asked groggily; for I was aware of a shimmering paleness in a corner of the room that was usually dark, as of a shaft of moonlight reflecting off a human face.

  " 'The Ghost of Christmas Past,' came the reply. The voice was most solemn but youthful, and very much of this earth.

  " 'Whose past?' I demanded. 'Who let you in?'

  " 'Your past,' said the shade; and then some rot about coming along with him."

  Holmes, settled deep in his chair with his lower limbs stretched in front of him and his eyes closed, said nothing, listening. His cigarette smoked between his fingers. As for myself, I felt my brow wrinkling. The narrative had begun to sound familiar.

  "The rest is quite personal," the earl continued. "Vivid memories of my childhood, Christmas dinner with my mother and father and my brother Peter and my sister Martha, and Father going on about a goose, and what-have-you. Obviously I was dreaming, but I had the distinct impression of having travelled a great distance, and that I was peeping at all this as through a window, with the Ghost of Christmas Past standing at my elbow. It was all very strange, but nice, and sad as well. My parents are dead, my sister married and gone to America, and my brother and I have not spoken in years. We quarrelled over our meagre inheritance. I suppose it is not unusual to feel wistful over the happier days of youth. Still, it was an odd coincidence."

  Holmes opened his eyes. "How was it a coincidence?"

  "I had spent much of that trying day shut up with Richard, my chief clerk, going over the accounts. W7hen at length the discrepancy was corrected, it seemed natural to invite him to join me in a glass of sherry at the tavern. He accepted, and we whiled away a convivial evening reminiscing about Christmases old and new. So it seems odd that I should dream about the very same thing that night."

  "Not at all, Your Lordship," I put in. "Man is a suggestible creature. It would be far more unusual to dream about something that was not in one's mind recently."

  "I think there is something in what you say, Doctor. Certainly it would help to explain the second part of my dream." The earl lit a fresh cigar, apparently forgetting the one he had left smouldering only half-smoked in the tray on his desk. "It seems I returned to my bed, for again the clock struck one and I found myself as I had previously, staring at a phosphorescence in the corner and asking who was there.

  " 'The Ghost of Christmas Present,' responded a most remarkable voice, jolly and full of timbre, as of a man in the fullness of his middle years. Just this, and again the summons to come along.

  "Now we were standing outside the window of a tiny flat in the City, witnessing what appeared to be a serious row between a young husband and his wife over money; something about not having sufficient funds to settle their bills, let alone celebrate the holiday. At the tavern, Richard had told me of a number of financial setbacks they had suffered because of unforeseen emergencies, but I had not perceived how serious the situation was until that moment. It appeared to threaten their union."

  "Had you met his wife?" Holmes asked.

  "I have not had that pleasure. However, he keeps a photographic portrait of her where he works. She is most comely."

  "Women generally are, in photographs. What happened when the clock again struck one?"

  Lord Chislehurst permitted himself a dry smile. "I should have been disappointed had you not seen the pattern. This phantom, who indicated through gestures that he was the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, was the most unsettling of all, and the picture he showed me of some future yuletide was bleak and hideous. I saw Richard's home broken, his wife, stigmatised by divorce, forced to make her living from the streets, even as Richard pursued a bitter and lonely existen
ce as an unloved and aging bachelor. Worse, I saw my own neglected grave. Evidently I had gone to it without obsequy, my harsh and penurious business practises having ruined lives and left none to mourn my passing." He shuddered.

  Holmes finished his cigarette. "In your waking moments, my lord, are you given to dwelling morbidly upon the subject of your future demise?"

  "Never. I regard it as an inevitability, which to brood over is to squander what little life we have. This was what I told Lady Chislehurst when she brought up the subject of my last will and testament.'

  "Indeed?" Holmes lifted his brows. "Did this discussion take place before or after your dream?"

  "Before. That very night, in fact. When 1 was late coming home from the tavern, she entertained various concerns over what might have befallen me, as wives will. When I arrived at last, she expressed relief, then scolded me as I was preparing to retire that I should be more careful, as the streets are not safe late at night for a man not in full possession of his wits, and that if I insisted upon placing myself in jeopardy I should make arrangements for the division of my estate before some footpad separates me from my watch and my life."

  "A practical woman."