Harold paused. “Isn’t that beautiful?” he added.
“Yes,” she said. “It is. But it’s odd, when I hear you say that… There’s something really conservative about you Sherlockians, isn’t there? I don’t mean in a political sense, but in an aesthetic one. Always wishing to return to this rose-tinted vision of the world as it existed a hundred years ago. ‘England is England yet…’ Well, this is England, too, right? Only now women can vote and racial discrimination is at least on the retreat. As a woman, I’ll tell you flat out, I wouldn’t want to live in 1895.”
“I understand,” said Harold. “There’s something… incomplete about our vision of Holmes’s time. I know it’s not real. I know that in the real 1895 there were two hundred thousand prostitutes in the city of London. Syphilis was rampant. Feces littered most major streets. Indian immigrants were locked up in Newgate on the barest suspicion that they had committed a crime. So-called homosexual acts were crimes, and they were punishable by years in prison. It was a racist culture, and a sexist one, too.”
Harold took a breath while he thought of how to proceed. “Look, I get it. I’m a white, heterosexual man. It’s really easy for me to say, ‘Oh, wow, wasn’t the nineteenth century terrific?’ But try this. Imagine the scene: It’s pouring rain against a thick window. Outside, on Baker Street, the light from the gas lamps is so weak that it barely reaches the pavement. A fog swirls in the air, and the gas gives it a pale yellow glow. Mystery brews in every darkened corner, in every darkened room. And a man steps out into that dim, foggy world, and he can tell you the story of your life by the cut of your shirtsleeves. He can shine a light into the dimness, with only his intellect and his tobacco smoke to help him. Now. Tell me that’s not awfully romantic?”
Sarah laughed. “Sure,” she said. “That definitely sounds romantic.” She looked out the window at the gray countryside sweeping by. “But maybe this is romantic, too.”
Harold looked at the passing trees, noticing how they were stooped over with water from a recent rain. He saw an expanse of grass, a damp heath pocked with yellow bursts of dandelion. He turned from the window to face Sarah, and as he did so, his elbow touched hers on the armrest between their seats.
“I see your point,” he said.
“Is that why you love the stories so much? For the romance?”
Harold considered this. He realized that he’d never before had to put into words his reasons for loving the Holmes stories. Did this sort of obsession even have reasons? If she had asked Harold why he loved his mother, there wouldn’t be any answer he could give. How could he then explain his love for Holmes?
“I think I love the idea that problems have solutions. I think that’s the appeal of mystery stories, whether they’re Holmes or someone else. In those stories we live in an understandable world. We live in a place where every problem has a solution, and if we were only smart enough, we could figure them out.”
“As opposed to…?”
“As opposed to a world that’s random. Where violence and death are happenstance-unpreventable and unstoppable. Of all the conventions of mystery stories, the one that’s impossible to break is the solution at the end. Conan Doyle has writings in his journals about it. And plenty of novelists since have tried. Can you write a mystery story that ends with uncertainty? Where you never know who really did it? You can, but it’s unsatisfying. It’s unpleasant for the reader. There needs to be something at the end, some sort of resolution. It’s not that the killer even needs to be caught or locked up. It’s that the reader needs to know. Not knowing is the worst outcome for any mystery story, because we need to believe that everything in the world is knowable. Justice is optional, but answers, at least, are mandatory. And that’s what I love about Holmes. That the answers are so elegant and the world he lives in so ordered and rational. It’s beautiful.”
“The romance of a rational world,” Sarah said. “Do you still think there are answers at the end of all of this?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Satisfying ones?”
Harold watched the rain. He wasn’t sure how to answer that question, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to.
CHAPTER 35 A Plea for Help
“One should put one’s foot to the door to keep
out insanity all one can.”
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
unpublished journal entry, 1912
November 23, 1900
A week after Arthur had stumbled free from the gates of Newgate, life in Hindhead had returned to normal. Or as close to normal as anything in Hindhead ever achieved. From the early-morning clanking of the chambermaids with their pans to the evening thunks of the butler as he closed the chimney flues, the house was alive with noise at every hour of the day and night. The stable master was having some difficulty with a new mare that had just arrived from Spain. Somehow little Roger had managed to break his arm when he toppled out of a wheelbarrow being pushed around by his older brother, Kingsley. Roger got a cast for his forearm, and Kingsley got a stern talking-to about excess roughhousing with his brother. Touie rested comfortably in her bedchamber, and one morning Arthur went so far as to bring her the breakfast tray himself, wearing one of the servants’ uniforms as a little joke. Touie had giggled like a girl when she realized that it was Arthur holding her tray of oatmeal. Arthur hadn’t been out to see Jean yet, so concerned was he with the affairs of the house, but he would be into the city to see her soon enough. He was happy-happier, really, than he could remember being in some time. It takes a shock to the system, doesn’t it, to make a man realize what good things he has.
What a dark and sinister madness must have overcome him, to make him think that he should be a detective himself. It was a miserable vocation taken up by miserable men. But, thankfully, that fog had lifted from his brain, and Arthur saw his life anew, as the days of middle age glimmered resplendently before him. He was a father. He was a husband. And he was a writer. He was neither detective nor criminal, and he would leave them both to chase each other around in circles as they saw fit. “The scarlet thread of murder”-he had written that phrase once, many years ago, as if it were something lovely, something vibrant. Well, he would let the thread drop. He would fashion his life-his true life-from another cloth.
Of course, a certain lingering curiosity was only natural. Who had killed Emily Davison and her friends? There was no shame in an occasional moment of wondering, so long as he didn’t give himself over to it. Arthur had never properly learned the name of the second girl to be murdered. She had signed the false name “Morgan Nemain” to the boardinghouse book, but Emily had referred to her as “Anna.” The Yard might have found something among Emily’s possessions that would reveal this Anna’s family name. He could send a quick word to Inspector Miller and-
But no. Down that way lay madness. When Arthur felt that inkling in his brain, that involuntary twitch, he would remind himself of the world right before his eyes. Arthur would feel his feet press against the hardwood floors of his half-reconstructed study, and a sensation of lift would buoy up his spine. From his neck to his tail to his heels to the floor and into the deep soil, Arthur was home. The twitch would pass.
Realism ruled his work. Oh, how good it felt to dive into something sensible for a change! No more of that nonsense about chasing archvillains down foggy alleyways with the aid of scent-sniffing hounds. No more magic, no more fantasy, no more romance. What frivolity was detective fiction, compared to the hard-nosed reality of true literature! Since putting Holmes to rest those years ago, Arthur had tried his hand at historical epics, scientific adventure, and even horror. There had been gallant knights on grand quests, damsels under hypnotic spells, and an evil sorceress of the occult. But now he had found his calling: war stories.