“He never caught who he was after?”
“No. In fact, I don’t even think the Yard regarded it as a serial-killer case. Jack the Ripper had shocked all of London a few years earlier, and I imagine they thought Arthur was letting his literary sensibilities get the best of him. But they were happy for the publicity, happy with the public’s knowing that Arthur Conan Doyle was on their side. As the years went on, actually, there would every now and then be this huge public outcry for Scotland Yard to deputize him again on some major case. When Agatha Christie disappeared, in 1926, all the newspapers had editorials asking Conan Doyle to get involved. And you know what’s funny? He did. And he found her. She had gone off for a drive in the country one day and never returned. Her car was crashed against a tree, but there was no blood or sign of a body.”
“Jesus. How’d he find her?”
“He correctly figured that there was only one train station she could have walked to-or been walked to-in the area, and only one train she could have gotten on without being noticed. Somehow, and I honestly forget how, he figured out which stop she would have had to get off at. Sure enough, her husband found her in that town, three days later, living under an assumed name. She’d had a nervous breakdown after catching him in an affair with another woman. It was kind of sad, really.”
“Wow. This doesn’t have anything to do with the missing diary, does it?”
“No.”
“Okay, so… Conan Doyle worked for Scotland Yard, and then- shortly after-resurrected Sherlock Holmes?”
“Yeah. The Great Hiatus came to an end with the publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles in March 1901. Sherlock Holmes had been dead for eight years, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, Arthur decided to bring him back. To write more stories about the fictional detective he loathed, by all accounts. He told people it was for the money, but that never quite made sense. He had all the money in the world already, plus he’d had blank-check offers from every publisher and magazine in the world for years at that point. Why then? And why bring Holmes back so… so different.”
“Different?” said Sarah, intrigued.
“Yeah,” said Harold. “After the Great Hiatus, when Holmes returned in those later stories, he was just different. Meaner. Colder. He starts manipulating witnesses for information. Lying to people. Committing crimes himself if he thinks it’ll serve his cause. One time he even seduces and proposes marriage to a housemaid in order to get her to let him into her house. Then he never calls on her again. He becomes a real bastard. He also seemed to have lost his faith in the English justice system. All of a sudden, he was acting as judge and jury, even meting out punishments for the criminals he caught. Early on, Holmes worked in conjunction with Scotland Yard, but in the later years he was completely independent. And he’d developed real contempt and animosity toward the police. Sure, the cop characters were always dumb in the Holmes stories, the better to show off how smart he was, but after the Hiatus the cops become obsolete. Holmes wants nothing to do with them at all.
“The question of the Great Hiatus-the question that Alex’s biography doesn’t seem like it’s capable of answering-is, what happened to Holmes while he was gone?”
“It sounds to me,” said Sarah, thinking it over, “that the question is, what happened to Arthur Conan Doyle?”
CHAPTER 23 The Suffragists
“Woman’s heart and mind are insoluble puzzles to the male.”
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
“The Adventure of the Illustrious Client”
November 11,1900
Arthur fastened the top button of his S-bend corset. He sucked in his belly while he affixed the bottom straps to his garters. The trumpet skirt was loose and wrapped easily around his waist. But as he stood up and the folds of his skirt fell delicately over his white stockings, Arthur felt a sharp pain in his chest and back. The corset hurt already, digging into his rib cage and shoulder blades.
“Ow, Bram, is all this really necessary?” he complained. “My God, it is tremendously uncomfortable.” Bram looked up from the more modern, “liberty” bodice around his own belly. Arthur was quite a sight. Clumps of pectoral fat were pressed up by his corset, giving the appearance of a pair of succulent breasts. His skirt, loose in the current style, fit him rather well. The incongruity of Arthur’s bushy mustache made Bram laugh out loud, though once he had shaved it, put a wig on, and applied a little makeup… well, Bram didn’t think Arthur would look half bad.
“You’ll look the image of a proper lady, Arthur, don’t you worry.” Bram couldn’t help smiling as he said it. “Holmes was always putting on some fresh skirts to go undercover in his adventures, wasn’t he? Seems a good time for you to give it a try. I’ve borrowed some stage makeup from Henry’s dressing room, and some wigs from the ladies’. They will not mind, and Henry will not notice.” Bram pointed to a stained porcelain sink in the corner of the room. The two men dressed before great mirrors, which reflected gaslight from a dozen surrounding lamps. They had taken hold of an abandoned dressing room, deep in the belly of the Lyceum Theatre. None of the actors wanted to use it any longer, because it remained the only dressing room still lit by gas. Bram had been forced to pay for the installation of electric lights in Henry’s dressing room shortly after he’d paid for the installation of electric lights onstage. Henry felt that it was inconceivable that he dress by gaslight, if he were to perform by electric light. Shortly thereafter all of the other actors had lodged similar protests, and Bram had the new lights installed throughout the theater, save for this single, faraway dressing room.
“I don’t see why I can’t continue my investigations in a good pair of trousers,” said Arthur. The corset was making him irritable. Even the fastening loops which hung from the back scraped against his skin awkwardly. He would not have a moment’s peace in this awful contraption.
“What else would you have us do?” said Bram. “Attend tonight’s meeting of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in top hats and tails? I believe they’d notice you in particular, the famed author and celebrated antisuffragist Arthur Conan Doyle. They’d eject us before we’d even made it to our seats. And if we dressed as other, less famous men, we’d still attract rather more attention than we need as a pair of gentlemen at a suffragist rally. If we’re to go, and to go unmolested, then we’re to go as women.”
Arthur knew that Bram was right. But he was still displeased.
“If you like,” Bram continued, “I can go to the meeting alone. No one knows who I am. I wouldn’t need any disguise at all to spend an evening with the ladies of the NUWSS.”
Arthur thought he detected a trace of bitterness in Bram’s voice. Just because the man’s literary career wasn’t moving along as he’d hoped, there was no cause for him to take his frustrations out on his more successful fellows.
“No, I need to be there myself. To see Millicent Fawcett and her satin gang. Someone is killing those girls off, and if I’m to protect the rest of them, I’ll need to see precisely what they’re up to.”
“Ever the chivalrous knight, aren’t you?” said Bram.
Arthur drew a thin evening shawl over his shoulders and tied it in front of his neck in a double bow. “Chivalry is the very soul of manhood. It is what separates men from beasts.”
“It is also,” said Bram as he tended to his skirt, “what separates men from women.”
“Indeed! As well it should.” Arthur toyed with the bonnet in his hand, spinning it around to find the proper straps. “Were men to become women and women to become men, why, that would spell the death of our civilization! It would be the fall of England.”