The famous Robert Browning had died only the year before but the equally famous Mrs Elizabeth Barrett Browning had been dead for almost thirty years. The present visit of their descendants to us might seem a coincidence, after the discovery of the Sonnets in Howell’s pocket. Sherlock Holmes, however, was not a great believer in the law of coincidence. He lived in a world of cause and effect.
Mrs Hudson knocked on the door at the appointed hour and announced with a look of self-conscious formality,
“Mr Robert Wiedemann Penini Browning and Mrs Fannie Cornforth Browning.”
I recognised, as any reader of the newspapers might, the distinctive names of Robert Browning’s son. He was universally known as “Pen” Browning, an easy-going young man who had taken up painting and sculpture, rather than poetry. I found him slighter in build than I would have expected. At thirty, he had almost the look of a man who might not yet be fully grown. His face was still youthfully round, though with full dark whiskers and thinning hair. His was such a contrast to the bold head and profile of his late father. Fannie Cornforth Browning appeared several years his junior. She was a fine and handsome woman, rather plump and with the blue eyes and red hair of a Titian painting. She had been, as I understood from the newspapers, American by birth and English by upbringing.
When the introductions were over and the Brownings were seated, it was Pen Browning, if I may so call him, who took the initiative.
“Mr Holmes-Dr Watson-my wife and I have lately had occasion to approach Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard. He can do little for us but he has suggested that we should consult you. It is a complicated and delicate matter. I fear that it concerns the death of a man called Augustus Howell, whose manipulation of the truth and downright chicanery had begun to threaten my parents’ reputation and our own peace of mind.”
“I am sorry to hear it,” said Holmes deferentially-he had put on his black frock coat for the occasion-“I know of the man Howell, of course, and I know of his reported death. I also know from Mr Lestrade that a copy of your mother’s poems was found with his body.”
Pen Browning nodded.
“He had been a complete stranger to me until I received a note from him. He suggested that he was prepared to sell the volume of poems to me-and a good deal else concerning my parents-for a very considerable sum of money. Indeed, I was to have met him on the following day. He said he was an agent of some kind and authorised to do so. He claimed that he had private papers in his possession, confidential papers emanating from my parents, which he was commissioned to put into a public auction on behalf of their owner. The volume of Sonnets itself was an extremely rare private edition of 1847, three years before general publication. It was his approach which brought me to London last month. You may perhaps know that Mrs Browning and I live most of the year in Venice.”
“Indeed,” said Holmes, “the Palazzo Rezzonico on the Grand Canal, I believe?”
“Correct. My father bought it and bequeathed it to me. You may also know something of the late Jeffrey Aspern’s life in Venice?”
Holmes looked a little surprised.
“Who does not know of Jeffery Aspern? A precursor of Edgar Allan Poe, who left Virginia in 1818 and lived so much of his life in Europe. The friend of Byron and, I believe, briefly of Shelley during their last years in Italy. Does not Edward Trelawny in his Recollections have something to say about their meetings in Venice and Ravenna?”
“And still more in his private papers.”
“Most interesting,” said Holmes enthusiastically, “I cannot pretend to be a literary critic but I have always considered that Aspern’s early promise remained unfulfilled. However, his ‘Juanita’ lyrics will live as long as poetry is read. His dates, if I remember correctly, were 1788 to 1863. He certainly outlived Lord Byron and his English counterparts. Like William Wordsworth he lasted too long, for a romantic poet, and he worked past his best.”
“You are remarkably well informed, sir.” Pen Browning looked at Holmes and then glanced quickly away again as though coming to the painful part of the matter. “You know that Aspern’s former companion, Juanita Bordereau, died last year as a very old woman?”
“I had read a notice of her death in the papers. She was quite ninety years old, I believe.”
“She became Aspern’s young mistress in 1820. The worse he treated her, the more devoted to him she seemed to become. After his death, twenty-seven years ago, she was joined at the Casa Aspern in Venice by her younger sister, Tina. They lived there until last year, as a pair of elderly spinsters. The house lies on a small canal in a quiet backwater.”
“Indeed,” said Holmes again. His eyes invited Pen Browning to continue.
“Since her sister’s death, Tina Bordereau has left the house empty and returned to America. The estate is a complicated one, for there was no marriage between the poet and his mistress, and no children. Everything is in the care of executors and agents. Yet the Casa Aspern apparently contains treasures of great literary value, as well as secrets capable of creating an insupportable scandal. I am told that in the locked drawers of a Napoleonic escritoire there lies the whole unpublished correspondence of Lord Byron and Aspern.”
The eyes of Sherlock Holmes narrowed in astonishment. Pen Browning continued.
“There are also said to be manuscripts of poems by Byron which have never seen the light of day. I have also been offered by a dealer the chance to purchase the manuscript of an unpublished novel of 1820, supposed to have been bequeathed by Byron to Aspern when his lordship left Venice on his final and fatal voyage to Greece. It is The Venetian Nun: A Gothic Tale, by William Beckford, the so-called “Abbot of Fonthill.” The only known copy to survive, it had been presented by the author to Byron. Goodness knows what more there may be. Worst of all, for me, there are said to be unknown poems and letters of my father’s and of my mother’s. That is what brings me here.”
“Remarkable,” said Holmes tolerantly.
“There are alleged to be letters written by both my parents. These may be rough drafts but they are none the less compromising. They include intimate letters to one another. Also my father’s private letters to close female friends written by him after my mother’s death in 1861. He was very close to Miss Isa Blagden while in Florence, as was my mother, and the attachment continued long after his bereavement. They exchanged letters sometimes every day. The same was true in London during his attachment to Miss Julia Wedgwood, also after my mother’s death. Such women were an intimate part of his life. There was nothing vicious or improper in these friendships-hardly even indiscreet. Yet it is now suggested by the agents that some of these Casa Aspern letters, containing expressions of private affections, are already in the hands of dealers.”
He paused, as if watching us for incredulity. If so, he found none.
“I fear,” said Holmes, “that a letter becomes the property of the person to whom it is addressed, though the right to publish it does not. However, the contents may be made known.”
“Such stories are lies, Mr Holmes, or at the best misinterpretations. How any such papers could have reached Aspern-let alone the Bordereau sisters-I do not know. Domestic dishonesty is unlikely but chicanery may well be the answer. A housemaid may have a follower. In truth, he cares nothing for her but a great deal for access to the house, to documents which he may steal and sell. Something of that sort. As for Jeffrey Aspern, of course my father, and indeed my mother, knew him. I do not think they found him simpatico and I am sure they would not have entrusted such papers to him knowingly. Of Robert Browning’s poetry there is said to be a rejected prologue to The Ring and the Book among the Aspern papers and also dramatic monologues excluded by my father from his great collection of Men and Women in 1855.”