The Surrey rental house was isolated. He had chosen the locale for its clean rural air, but it was remote. He didn’t say anything, but at such moments he wished they had a dog to guard the house. A large, ferocious hound. However, Touie’s respiratory difficulties forbade the owning of pets.
Miss Leckie suddenly brightened. “Oh, but I quite forgot. I brought gifts for the children.” She reached down and opened the bag at her feet, drawing out two packages wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. Conan Doyle instantly guessed where the presents had come from, but said nothing, biting down on the stem of his pipe to suppress a smile.
“Presents? How generous of you,” Louise Doyle said in a peevish voice. Conan Doyle saw the flash of jealousy in her eyes. “Unfortunately, we must not allow our children to be spoiled. They already have plenty of toys.”
“Oh please may we have them, Mummy?” Mary Doyle asked, looking up at her mother.
“Yes, we want our presents!” Kingsley importuned. “Please, Mummy, please!”
Faced with the prospect of breaking her children’s hearts, Louise Doyle had no choice but to acquiesce. “I suppose,” she said with obvious reluctance, “under the circumstances. Oh… very well.”
The children pounced on the packages and tore them open with glee. Kingsley danced with glee at his windup monkey. He plopped down on the rug and instantly began to wind the key. The monkey made a comical chuttering sound as it backflipped and then flipped again, bringing squeals of childish delight from the young boy.
Mary tore open her present and gasped. She looked up at Jean Leckie, her eyes pooled to overflowing. “Oh, thank you! Thank you! Thank you! It is quite the loveliest doll I’ve ever seen.”
“Show us your doll, Mary,” Conan Doyle urged.
Mary held up the doll for all to see. It was the very one Jean Leckie had been so drawn to at Jedidiah’s Emporium of Mechanical Marvels.
“But she has a secret,” Jean Leckie said mysteriously. She gestured, and Mary brought over the doll and knelt at her feet. Jean Leckie lifted the doll’s petticoats, causing a moment of embarrassment, but then all noticed the key dangling from its blue ribbon. She wound the key fully and handed the doll back. The music box whirred and began to play an aria. The silver notes touched Conan Doyle’s heart. He glanced at Touie and saw that his wife was looking intently at Jean and the children gathered at her feet, her eyes liquid and gleaming.
Louise Doyle rose creakily from her chair, leaning on the arms for support.
“Are you quite well, Mrs. Doyle?”
“I am rather fatigued. You will excuse me, Miss Leckie, if I retire to my bed.”
“Touie?” Conan Doyle asked in a concerned voice.
She recomposed her face and said, “I am fine, Arthur. Simply tired. It has been a trying day.” She turned her gaze to Miss Leckie, and this time her smile, although pained, seemed genuine.
“Good night to you, Miss Leckie. And thank you for the gifts. Your kindness has made you a favorite with our children.”
Louise Doyle shuffled from the room, leaning first on the back of a chair, the sideboard, and finally the doorframe. Conan Doyle dallied a moment, and then went after her. When he reached the hallway, his wife was trudging up the stairs in her slow, deliberate fashion, pausing after each laboring step to catch a ragged breath.
“Touie?” Conan Doyle called up to her from the foot of the stairs. “Are you quite well?”
His wife paused a moment before turning. She spoke with a hitch in her voice, but her words had gravity to them. “I have watched you all night, Arthur. The way you look at that young woman. And the way she looks at you.”
Conan Doyle’s heart fluttered. He raised a hand to protest, but his wife shushed him. “I admit I am jealous. What wife would not be? But I am a realist. We both know how tenuous my grip on life is. I would never willingly give you up… never… but I have watched how that young woman is with my children. I love you and the children more dearly than I love my own life. I despair to think of you lonely. I despair to think of my children growing up without a mother. It has long been my greatest fear. I do not seek to die readily. But neither shall I seek to linger. For once, I see happiness before me.” Her voice broke. Tears trickled unashamedly down her drawn face. “Y-you have my blessing. You both have my blessing.…”
Conan Doyle said nothing as his wife labored up the stairs, but when he returned to the parlor, his heart felt so full he feared it might burst.
For the sake of decorum, Conan Doyle had surrendered his bedroom to their houseguest, while he slept on the day bed in his study. By the time all had retired for the evening and the house fell silent, night and its darkness crouched on the other side of the window glass. He sat at his writing desk, sipping a brandy and staring at his own reflection in the window.
He was a young thirty-six years old. His brown eyes were bright and clear. His hair was dark and glossy without a single gray hair. Thanks to a regimen of walking, riding his tricycle, and vigorous sports ranging from golf to cricket, he was physically in his prime. His life with Touie was approaching its end. Now he dared to entertain a new life, a second life, with the ravishing Jean Leckie.
A stir of shadows outside startled him from his reverie. Something had flitted past the window. An owl? A bat? Or something larger? Could an intruder be lurking?
He reached for the right-hand drawer of his writing desk, slid it open, and fumbled for a heavy object trussed in a black cloth. He drew it out — never taking his eyes from the window — and shook loose the wrapping, revealing his Webley revolver. His large fingers scrabbled in the drawer for a box of cartridges. Charged with adrenaline, his hands shook slightly as he pushed the fat bullets into the empty chambers, loading all six rounds. He stood up from his chair, banged the drawer shut with one knee, cinched tight the belt of his robe, and strode for the door.
He stepped from the house into a dark, moonless night. Damp night air pooled liquid and chill in his lungs. The revolver held ready, his slippered feet silently trod the front path to the road, where he stood, peering this way and that, scanning the shadows. Something hunkered in the far distance, an amorphous blob of darkness. But it was too dark to make out any detail. He could be looking at anything: a stand of hedgerows, a random tangle of shadows. Was that a carriage of some kind parked atop the rise of the lane? And then, as if in confirmation, he caught the faint whinny of a horse in the distance. It seemed to confirm his deduction, but then he remembered that his farmer neighbor kept several horses. It could well be one of his. He looked down at the dirt road for wheel tracks, but he had not brought a lantern with him and the roadway was unreadably dark.
With his back turned and his attention fixed at his feet, he did not see the man-sized shadow slide from behind the bushes at the front of his house and step in through the open front door. Conan Doyle stood stock still for several long minutes, looking, listening. He drew in a deep breath, sniffing the air, which held country smells of manure and the tang of peat fires.
He had been imagining things.
He suddenly became aware of the weighty revolver in his hand and slipped it into the pocket of his robe, then turned and shuffled his slippered feet back toward the warmth and light of his open front door.
Conan Doyle was dredged up from a hideous dream by the rapatatatatat of tinny drumming. His mind bumped up against the membrane of sleep like a balloon bumping up against a ceiling it could not break through.
And then a piercing scream tore his eyes open.
He struggled to kick loose of the tangle of sheets wrapped about his legs and tumbled from the daybed onto the floor. Scrambling to his feet, he banged a knee painfully into a chair and limped toward the door of his study, only to turn back to snatch up the revolver from his desktop. By the time he left the study, the drumming had stopped. His heart galloped when he looked down the hallway and saw the front door standing wide open. Then a second piercing shriek drew his eyes up the staircase. A young girl’s scream.