The Autobiography of Sherlock Holmes Read online

  Nanny Dobney had a soft, ample figure. As children, we all delighted in her welcoming lap and arms as she read us stories or listened to our questions. Her hair always smelled of violets, even when it had turned silver. She wore a gold locket and only once showed us the picture of a young soldier inside.

  Nanny used logic and reason in her life lessons, whether on nature rambles or in discussions of choices and consequences. Her soft voice was never raised and she never resorted to even the mildest forms of punishment; she simply enlisted our cooperation and devotion.

  Church Court is an early, eighteenth century, stone, gray pile of a country manor house on the Isle of Thanet. It is built upon the site of at least one prior house dating back to feudal times. The family holdings covered a large portion of land in Maiden Wood, as well as fore-shore and docklands fronting on the English Channel. Our father’s firm, then in its third and last generation of Holmes ownership, factored corn, coal, minerals, and ore between England and Europe and its fleet of cargo ships used our ancestral lands as their home port as they moved between London, Amsterdam and Calais. For many generations before the establishment of the family firm, Church Court had been the feudal demesne of the Holmes family which had a long history as the minor squires of Maiden Wood, involved in agriculture and deriving rents from the thirty or so tenant farms across the family lands. As the only remaining member of the Holmes family, I retain ownership of Church Court but have not lived there since my university days. The house has been rented for income since our mother’s death and the farms were gradually sold to the farmers who held the tenant lifeholds.

  The year after the birth of Mycroft, Mother and Father removed to a villa in the south of France near Nice where they lived for a year. Similarly, one year after the birth of Wittrell, they decamped to Lake Como for a year. And, a year after Juliette’s birth, they resided in Venice, returning after nine months due to the heat. My first birthday was observed at a villa on Lake Geneva where the now numerically larger Holmes family lived during 1853. It was there, during reportedly pleasant hours of conversation at a lakeside coffee house, that my father became acquainted with, and thereafter maintained a many-year correspondence with, a brilliant private tutor in theoretical astro-mathematics who would, in later years, have a profound influence on my career, and I on his.

  As a family, we enjoyed, of course, the privileges of prosperity and class. As children, we were given the manners and social capabilities expected of families in our place in society. Our parents frequently gave parties, dinners and week-end ‘stays’ in the country for a diverse and interesting circle of their friends that included writers, politicians, government ministers, artists, explorers, actors and scions of business. My mother particularly enjoyed inserting strong, passionate feminists into the mix of guests to assure stimulating and lively interchanges during the long and elegant dinners at Church Court. Contrary to the family conventions of the time, our parents always included the four of us at dinner and we soon all learned not only the art of conversational repartee, but the nuances of an intellectual society.

  Memory calls up one of my early fascinations with the long dinners. The table, with the six members of our family and numerous guests, was laid with the full array of Victorian-era tableware, china and crystal. From my seat near the end of the table, the flawless order and alignment of the silver and various plates and glasses the full length of the table captured my mind and my growing affinity for precision. I learned to not only memorize the original positions of all the objects on the table, but to memorize the changes to the implements and dishes made by each person during the course of the dinners. Even now, these many years later, I can recall the exact progression of a salt cellar’s migrations during a celebratory birthday dinner for my mother.

  In addition to Nanny Dobney, our family was well cared for by a housekeeper, a maid, a cook and a butler. The cook and butler were married—a Scots couple from Inverness, Hume and Mrs Hume. The housekeeper was a highly-efficient woman from Kinlet, Shropshire, Mrs Hodgson, whose proclivities included an intense dislike for tobacco smoke and an eternally gray outlook focused on temperance and moderation in all things. She was a counter-balance to the Humes who were both jolly Scots Pagans who celebrated life and a liberal sampling of the Tantalus and gasogene. The loyal household was brilliantly managed by Mother who maintained equilibrium and equanimity among all.

  At age ten I was given a pony that I never liked. It was given to a neighbor a year later. Horses remained thereafter, for me, an essential attachment to a Hansom cab. I did, however, benefit from the close study of the imprints of horse hooves and shoes and, some years later, wrote a detailed monograph on the determination of breed and age from hoof prints and the classifications of the distinctive hammer and punch marks of county farriers.

  My youth was solitary. Mycroft took the part of my childhood friend; in reality he was more like my mentor given the twelve years difference in our ages. From age six when I began my schooling to age nineteen when I left for university, my associations were almost entirely those of Nanny Dobney, my family and the family friends and retainers. The child-like innocence so valued by others never found its way to my early years; I was born middle-aged and remained there, a fixed point in unchanged time.

  The Holmes squires had a long history of educational progressivism. My great-grandfather established a school for Maiden Wood in 1770 complete with a qualified headmaster and a carefully chosen staff of instructors. Over its now one-hundred fifty-nine years of service, Thanet School has not only educated the Holmes offspring but—due to my ancestors’ successive liberality and vision—those of the tenants and villagers of Maiden Wood, as well as numerous progeny of the landed gentry in the near environs of Kent who were accommodated as tuition-paying day-scholars. Over the years, many of the school’s sixth form graduates went up to Oxford, Cambridge or other desirable universities of the realm.

  Unlike my father and brothers, as well as prior Holmes males, all of whom graduated Cambridge, I was admitted to Exeter College, Oxford where I took an undistinguished Ordinary in natural sciences. While my siblings achieved Upper Firsts and Masters Degrees, my largely self-directed studies were outside the academic tolerance of even the progressive leanings of Exonian dons. Fortunately, I competed well at fencing and was tolerated primarily for my ability to excel at foils against Exeter’s sister college, Emmanuel College, Cambridge. I went up to Oxford in October of 1871, and came down in May of 1874. Aside from a skill for fencing, I acquired a working knowledge of organic chemistry, but little else. And, again, unlike my father and siblings, I made no important contacts or friends who would have any lasting importance in my later career. I entered life self-contained and I shall leave it in the same manner. Only three people have penetrated my detachment to be regarded with what may pass for affection but which was, in fact, admiration: Mycroft, Watson and ‘The Woman.’

  During the years at Oxford, my time was divided between studies in chemistry at Exeter College and an informal course of eclectic studies in numerous of the other colleges of Oxford. There existed in my mind the idea that I would learn chemistry and other sciences along with abnormal history and human criminology and, by so doing, bring science to bear on criminal activity, a worthy use for a superior intellect in my estimation. And so, I took knowledge from wherever it was to be found; all colleges and all disciplines were fair game for my self-directed education. A morning would find me in the laboratory; an afternoon in the dissecting rooms; evenings in various college libraries reading the history of crime and criminals. An experiment with human blood or enzymes often led me to specialty laboratories at various colleges equipped for specialty analyses and thence to another college’s library with a collection of historical treatises on mass murders, serial deaths or military executions. I viewed all of the colleges of Oxford as being my personal resource for knowledge, a concept that shattered the linear conventions of an institution nearing nine-hundred years of unchanging, insula
r existence.

  It was in my third year at Oxford that the raw elements of deduction were linked for the first time in my brain. The physical observation of wet grass, linked with the chemical knowledge of ash, linked to a unique boot print, linked with the psychological reaction to fear, linked with the analyses of time and distance, linked with geographic certainty of a surrounding neighborhood, all came precisely together to produce a flawless, serial, analytic deduction taking me to a specific room in a specific house where a specific crime was about to take place by a specific criminal with murder aforethought about to occur; and the instantaneous linkage of all those elements into a cohesive and accurate deduction coursed through my brain like lightning, and I emerged another person, forever to be more machine than corporeal.

  At that moment, my studies were complete. I possessed the essential knowledge, deductive tools and connective synapses to inhabit the center of the organ of crime and defeat its purposes. My brain was on fire and would burn with a white-hot intensity for decades to follow.

  2

  There is only one city in the whole of the world that can nourish white-hot intensity: London.

  After coming down from Oxford and spending a week at Church Court, I departed on Sunday, 31 May 1874 on the second full moon of the month, for London. My father made over a generous allowance to me for expenses, but I accepted only a small annual stipend of one-hundred guineas from him until I could make my own way.

  I chose the British Museum as the centre of my web in order to have access to its vast library and reading room for historical research. Close by also, were the great stations, Covent Garden, and a number of the hospital laboratories wherein my researches were to continue. After only three nights in a boarding house in Holborn, on 4 June I located satisfactory rooms at 47 Montague Street, Bloomsbury, next the Museum to its east, between Russell Square and Great Russell Street. The owner, an antiquarian specializing in Byzantine studies, lived quietly in rooms on the second floor and fitted the ground floor as his extensive library and museum housing his arcania. Mr Arbuthnot let the entire third and fourth floors, furnished, for a quite low rate likely owing to his complete lack of knowledge of the prevailing economics of 1874 due to his oyster-like existence lived almost exclusively in the Byzantine Era, and, having lost the previous tenant to the attractions of opal mining in Australia, had immediate availability on the day I noted his ‘To Let’ sign next the entry. We came to terms and I removed my few belongings to my new lodgings within the day.

  Arbuthnot employed a housekeeper-cook, a maid, and a boy-in-buttons to service his and his lodger’s needs and his shop requirements. Arbuthnot was unusual in that, as a young man of twenty-five, whilst serving in a book shop in Great Russell Street, a collapsing book-case fell upon him and rendered him unconscious for a full day due to the blow, affecting the limbic area of the brain. When he awoke, he no longer possessed the sense of smell. He was, for many years, a perfect landlord for a tenant prone to noxious chemical experiments and the near-permanent acrid fog of tobacco smoke above stairs.

  And here, in the interest of accuracy, I must begin to clear away Watson’s persistent use of protective red herrings throughout his many narratives of our years together. Watson always feared retaliatory malice from the criminal world, especially as my reputation grew. He wrote consistently and imaginatively of our lodgings at 221B Baker Street and of our landlady-housekeeper, Mrs Hudson. Watson mentioned Montague Street as my former lodgings only once in his description of our first meeting and, subsequently, our taking rooms together at 221B. But, it was not in Baker Street that we shared rooms; it was always 47 Montague Street where I have lived continuously for over fifty-five years and where, for a number of those years, I intermittently shared rooms with Watson. There was no Mrs Hudson. The housekeeper-cook employed by Arbuthnot was Mrs Vestal Hunter to whom Watson attributed all of the gracious qualities of the long-suffering, but fictional, Mrs Hudson. Mrs Hunter, in 1874, was a most capable woman of only twenty-two years of age. Her husband had been tragically killed in a train accident, and she had a daughter, Violet, who went on to be a governess. After Arbuthnot’s death in early 1896, I purchased the Montague Street property from his estate and provided Mrs Hunter with a lifehold on the portion formerly occupied by Mr Arbothnot. She remains housekeeper today, now seventy-seven years old, healthy and quite happy in her spacious ground and first floor rooms. We have provided a cook and maid who care for our respective retirement quarters and modest needs.

  The second floor has a large, comfortable sittin-groom facing the street and two smaller rooms at the rear, one that serves as a combination library and study and the other a bedroom with a small en suite. Two large bedrooms on the third floor face the front and the rear with a full en suite between, installed after the Great War. Paralleling the bedrooms to the north is a long lumber-room with a collection of paraphernalia, oddments, costumes, commonplace books, and other flotsam of the years. Meals can be taken in either the sitting-room or the third floor bedroom owing to the convenience of a dumb waiter also installed after the war which connects to the kitchen below stairs. During the Watson years in residence, beginning in 1881, he preferred the third floor rear bedroom overlooking the gardens while I occupied the second floor bedroom adjacent the sitting room, an arrangement that admirably suited my often nocturnal and inconsistent habits. Watson liked his sleep undisturbed. And, it must be said, he was a prodigious snorer and his third floor rear bedroom suited us both.

  The only length of time when I did not lodge at 47 Montague Street was the period following on the Reichenbach Falls business when, again as a protective device against retaliation, and as a safeguard against the possible necessity for future hiatuses, Watson described my wanderings on the Continent and beyond in various disguises, but primarily as the diffuse and fictitious Sigerson. Again, accuracy requires a correction. I returned from Switzerland having spent a week hidden in various agricultural wagons crossing France, finally boarding incognito one of my family’s coastal freighters at Saint-Nazaire. Two days later, I was safely tenanted as a beekeeper on a small holding in Maiden Wood and passed the years 1889 to 1891 as Colin Fraser, apiast. It was during those bucolic years that I wrote Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations Upon the Segregation of the Queen which Beach & Thompson kindly waited publication until 1910 when all danger had passed.

  The sitting-room was—and is—largely as described by Watson. The bullet holes remain where I idly placed them; the Persian slipper continues to give service; the old side-board is in its accustomed place; and the coal-scuttle next the fireplace still holds the cigars, pipes and accoutrements of the habitual user of tobacco. Little has changed in the interior furnishings of a life during a long passage of time when, without, all has changed. Here, in my old and familiar rooms, with the thick, yellow fog at the windows illuminated by gas-light, it is always—and always will be—1874.

  3

  With my nascent web established within the narrow confines of the British Museum and Montague Street, I began extending its threads into four major sectors: crime, police; high society; and commoners. Crime fuelled my enterprise and my bloodlust; the police provided the necessary, ultimate sanctions; high society provided the income; and the commoners provided the variety and perversions of victimisation that stimulated my interests. In total, my ‘organisation’ encompassed the four opiates of evil, good, retribution and reward. And I could pick and choose which strand of my web to tighten and which to relax in order to achieve the stimuli I desired. There were cases where I allowed the criminals to lead the chase; others when I chose the police as the scent hounds; still others where the commoners were the whippers-in; and sufficient other cases where high society was allowed to be the Masters of the Hounds for the benefit of their guineas. All of my cases had one common element: I alone in this entire system of crime, punishment, victimisation and reward possessed the precise and accurate deductive solution owing entirely to my superior intellect
and singularly developed skills of observation and reasoning. Mine was the perfect career for a precision brain motivated by a rational ego and the tantalising knife-edge of good and evil. Had my father’s innocent coffee-house conversations with the astro-mathematician during the months at Lake Geneva in 1852 ever grown into an influential mentoring or retainer position with our family for that supreme titan of evil, I could have just as easily supplanted him as the Napoleon of crime and established my web for wholly evil purposes, such are the hair-trigger dualities of my unique powers and singular personality. Fortunately, the bulwark that was Mycroft and the essential Watsonian goodness prevented my experimentation with the dark skills.

  Watson did not join me at 47 Montague Street until 15 January 1881, on the cloudless evening of a bright full moon. Within a month, we were involved in the Jefferson Hope murder case which Watson was to call (in response to my suggestion) A Study In Scarlet.

  There were, however, six and a half years prior to Watson’s association when I lived in my Montague Street lodgings alone. During those unobserved years, from June 1874 to January 1881, I had begun to build my practice and develop my web. The last half of 1874 brought only seven insignificant cases—two burglaries, a missing one-armed chestnut roaster, a Malay sabotage of a Thames barge, an obvious murder of passion, the odd disappearance of four Hansom cabs in one evening, and the one case earning over one-hundred guineas, the return of Lord Sedley’s kidnapped albino Macaw.