Commonplaces
Naomi Novik
In 2009 a young millionaire named Marcus Schrenker leapt from his single-engine plane and parachuted to the ground, leaving his auto-piloted aircraft to crash just fifty yards from a residential neighborhood in Florida. Schrenker, who apparently intended for the plane to fly into the ocean and be lost forever, was attempting to fake his own death in order to escape from a mounting pile of personal, financial, and criminal problems. Many of us were astounded by Schrenker's reckless disregard for others, but we also had to grudgingly admit that his plan had a certain panache, however badly he ended up botching things. Of course, when it comes to faking your own death with panache, nobody beats Sherlock Holmes, who spent several years traveling the globe after his apparent death at Reichenbach Falls, and who managed to keep the fact that he was still alive a secret even from his good friend Dr. Watson. But many readers have wondered, why couldn't Holmes have found some secret way to set the good doctor's mind at ease? Our next tale, in which we get an old acquaintance's view of Holmes during the Great Hiatus, suggests an answer to this mystery.
"My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence."
– Sherlock Holmes, "The Red-Headed League"
The newspaper in Lisbon came at eight and went to Godfrey first, before he should leave for his office. "My wife is that treasure who does not require entertainment at the breakfast table," he liked to say of her to his friends; it would have been a little more accurate to say, Irene did not require the sort of entertainment she was likely to get out of Godfrey at the breakfast table, which did not very well meet the name.
She would have liked to take a section of the paper, but while Godfrey naturally obliged any such request, he would interrupt her in asking for pages back, that he might finish those items begun earlier. It was easier in the end to be patient, to let Godfrey keep the pages in neat order until he was done, while she spent her own breakfast sitting quietly in contemplation of her day and the small square of garden their cottage boasted. Her mornings when he had gone did not lack leisure.
"Sherlock Holmes is dead," he told her, before the maid had brought out the eggs, "at Reichenbach Falls."
She made absent expressions of dismay and shock, and when he had gone to his office, she read the story over three times: a bare paragraph describing the famous detective lost, a criminal mastermind claiming a final victim, his old companion left behind to give the report.
It was not much, and reading it over again did not make it grow longer. She already could have told the story over verbatim-years of practice from studying librettos-but even so she did not like to leave the paper on the table to be swept away; instead she carried it into the bedroom and put it into her bureau, and went outside to tend the roses. In twenty minutes she came back inside and read it once more, and then went out to the front stoop.
The street boys knew her, courtesy of a ball returned after a broken window without more than a calm request they should aim away from her house in future. They were happy to take a few pennies to fan out into the town for news for her. An hour brought her a slightly worn copy of The Strand with Dr. Watson's voice thick as old treacle on the page, full of studied melodrama and real grief.
At breakfast the next morning, she read it over and over again, while across the table Godfrey placidly read a fresh newspaper, full of different news.
There was no reason it ought to have cut up her peace. She had not seen the man in two years and then had known him not at alclass="underline" that he had once invaded her house in guise to rob her was not much foundation for affection, except what one might feel, she supposed, for a satisfying opponent one has bested. The story-of course she had read it-the story had been very flattering, but she had enough of admirers to discount the value of another, even one who put her photograph above emeralds. And in any case, now he was dead.
The magazine went into the drawer with the newspaper, however.
Her mornings were of a settled round these days: what little management the little house needed, a trifle of work in the garden, a handful of calls received and returned. If her marriage had not made her wholly respectable, it had made her sufficiently so to permit her neighbors to excuse an acquaintance which so satisfyingly allowed them to partake of just the least bit of notoriety, indirectly; to mention in whispers, at assemblies and balls, yes, that is her, the famous-
Irene tried not to think in such a way of them, those kind and stupid ladies who came visiting. Ordinarily she did not. She could not begrudge anyone a little excitement at so little expense to her, and they were kind: when she had been ill, last year-so wretchedly inadequate a word for that hollowed-out experience, tears standing in her eyes because she would not, would not let them run, not in front of the businesslike doctor speaking to Godfrey over her head, telling him prosaically they must be cautious, warning against another attempt too soon, while he washed his hands of the blood-
They had been really kind then, beyond polite expressions of sympathy: food appearing in those first few days when she could think not at all, and clean linen; Mrs. Lydgate and Mrs. Darrow coming by in the mornings with embroidery, sitting in perfect silence for hours while the window-squares of sun tracked a pathway across the sitting room. They had asked her to sing, a week later on, and when she had stopped halfway through Una voce poco fa, drooping over the pianoforte, they had taken up without a word a conversation about their unreliable maidservants, until she had mastered herself.
So she could not despise them anymore, because the kindness was real, as all the crowned glories had proven not to be; she knew better now, or thought she knew, how to value the treasures of the world against one another. But that week she found herself freshly impatient; she did not attend to the conversation in Mrs. Wessex's drawing room, until someone said to her, a little cautiously, "But you knew him, my dear, didn't you?"
"No," she said, "no more than the hare knows the hound."
"Well, it's a pity," Mrs. Ballou said, in her comfortably stolid way, without ever looking up from her knitting. "I'm sure I don't know what he was about, though, letting that dreadful man throw him off a mountain instead of calling the police, like a sensible man."
"Oh," Irene said, "yes," and taking her leave very abruptly went outside and stood in the street, half-angry and half-amused with herself, to be so schooled by a fat old dowager. Of course he was not dead.
She was not sure what to feel for a moment, but her sense of humor won out in the end, and she laughed on the doorstep and went home to throw the papers into the dustbin at last. There was an end of it, she told herself; it was the inherent absurdity of the story which had gnawed at her.
John Watson believed his own story, she was sure. He was, she thought, very much like Godfrey: the sort of man who would think it-not romantic, but rather quite ordinary pro patria mori, even if there were convenient alternatives to be had for the cost of a little reasoning. The sort of man who would trust in what a friend told him, unquestioningly, because to doubt would be faintly disloyal. Easy to fool such a man, and more than a little cruel to do so.
"Is something distressing you, my dear?" Godfrey asked, and she realized she was drumming her fingertips upon the writing table, while her correspondence went unanswered.
"I am only out of sorts," she said. "This wretched heat!" This was not very just: it was only the beginning of June.
Two days later she took a train to Paris: alone, but for her maid. "If you would not mind waiting a week, I could tie up my affairs tolerably well," Godfrey said.