“That’s the period covered by the missing diary,” Harold explained to Sarah. She returned a look indicating that not only did she not require his explanation, she did not particularly appreciate it.
“Oh, yes,” said Dr. Garber. “That rings a bell. Cale said something about a missing diary of Conan Doyle’s, how he’d been after the thing for ages. ‘Since I first began my study of Sherlockiana,’ I think that was the phrase he used. He was such a character, that one.”
“Do you know if he found anything about the missing diary in the letters?”
Dr. Garber pushed open the double doors of the library building and stopped. Her hands continued to hold open the doors in front of her, as if she were announcing the entrance of royalty.
“To be honest, I don’t know,” she replied after some thought. “He did not seem pleased with what he’d found. I can tell you that. He left in rather a hurry, when he’d finished. He didn’t even stop by to say goodbye-it was only that I happened to pass him on the footpath back there as I was on my way to give a lecture. He was all mumbles, very twitchy. I’d have thought it was rude, but I’ve had my share of researchers around over the years, and I know how they can get. Like a bunch of actresses, always overemotional about some crisis or another.”
Harold did his best not to appear twitchy himself. The more Dr. Garber said, the more promising these letters seemed. Clearly, what was in them had meant a great deal to Cale’s investigation. Harold’s tongue fluttered inside his mouth. He bit down on his lip. As soon as he saw these letters, he felt, the whole of the mystery would reveal itself to him…
And yet when, ten minutes later, Dr. Garber left Harold and Sarah alone in the underground rare-manuscript reading room, little was instantly revealed. Locked in the moistureless, climate-controlled room, Harold laid two cardboard boxes on the small wooden table. Both boxes were fastened shut with white string and marked with lined index cards. “STOKER, BRAM,” read the cards. “COLLECTED LETTERS.” The years of Stoker’s life contained within each box had been marked as well. Harold ran his hand underneath the string. It felt like lingerie against his stubby forefinger.
He couldn’t get the string untied, so Sarah, with her long, thin nails, stepped in to help. She scratched at the string with a catlike playfulness, and it fell apart from the box at the stroking of her nails. At the same time, both Harold and Sarah dug their hands into the cardboard box hungrily, pulling out thick stacks of plastic-protected papers. Each page was filled with Bram Stoker’s own narrow and nearly illegible handwriting. Flipping through them left Harold both excited and awestruck. Millimeters from his fingers, behind the clear plastic sleeves, lay the dirty pen marks of Bram Stoker himself.
Where had Stoker been when he wrote these letters? In the study of his home in… Kensington? Yes, that’s right, Stoker was living in Kensington in 1900. Harold remembered from Conan Doyle’s diary-that is, in one of the volumes that hadn’t been lost-about how Stoker had had his house outfitted for electric lights in that year; it had been one of the first private houses in London to have them. Conan Doyle talked about the shocking experience he encountered each time he’d visit Bram under those electric bulbs. Harold held the plastic sheets up very close to his face, communing with the pen strokes. What did they say?
Everything, Harold soon learned, and yet nothing at the same time. He and Sarah divided up the letters from the fall of 1900, trying to find any written to Conan Doyle. They found short letters to Stoker’s entire extended family, they found obsequious letters to every well-known theater professional in London, and they even found repentant letters to the writer Hall Caine, to whom it seemed that Stoker owed a considerable sum of money. But they found none written to Conan Doyle, except the carbon-copy receipt of a single telegram Stoker had sent. On December 1, 1900, Stoker had sent a telegram to Conan Doyle that read, in its entirety, “Come at once. Please. B.S.”
It was equal parts thrilling and infuriating. What did Stoker need to see Conan Doyle about so urgently? Where was Conan Doyle’s reply? What were those two up to, after all?
Harold felt sure that Stoker held the key to everything that was happening, but he couldn’t think of what Stoker and Conan Doyle had gotten into together. His first thought was that they had composed a story together, and yet that failed to explain any of the mystery surrounding Cale’s final clue. Why not just make that story public, however poor it might have been?
Harold tried to imagine Stoker’s involvement in Conan Doyle’s other known activities at the time. Had Stoker joined him in one of his brief, unsuccessful investigations for Scotland Yard? None of the newspaper reports at the time mentioned anything about Conan Doyle having discovered anything particularly noteworthy. Scholars had even checked the Scotland Yard records, which were quite thorough. Whatever Conan Doyle had gotten up to there, it hadn’t amounted to much.
Curiously, Harold did find a letter in one of the piles addressed to one “Inspector Miller, Scotland Yard.” Bram had written him a brief note thanking him for his assistance. “Your kind help at Newgate was very much appreciated,” read the letter. Harold thought this odd but didn’t know quite what to make of it. Why would Stoker have been writing to Scotland Yard? And Newgate… Did that mean someone had been in prison?
After an hour of poring over the semi-legible letters, most of Harold’s excitement had faded. In all the letters Bram Stoker had written in the fall of 1900, and into the winter of 1900-1901, there was nothing addressed to Conan Doyle and nothing that seemed like it could have sent Alex Cale into a depressive stupor.
“Nothing, right?” said Sarah as she set down a handful of letters.
“Right. Nothing.” Harold wasn’t sure what to do next.
“That’s about it for these boxes.”
Harold could do nothing but nod. There was something here, he was sure of it. But where? He turned the words of Alex Cale’s final message over and over in his head. Then he spoke them aloud.
“ ‘ The old centuries… have powers of their own… ’ ” He let the Dracula quote drip from his lips. “The old centuries…” It was a beautiful phrase, Harold thought. “… ‘Which mere modernity cannot kill.’ ” How poignant and poetic that last bit was as well-“mere modernity.” There are some things, some evil things, so old that not even a little thing like modernity can stomp them out.
“What was Cale trying to tell us about Stoker? Why was he pointing us to Stoker’s letters? What did Stoker know that Cale discov…” Harold trailed off midword. The flash of inspiration in his head was sudden and discrete. It was like the moment he’d had in the hotel armchair. There had been a period of not-knowing, and then this moment, and now Harold had entered a period of knowing. He simply knew.
“The diary is gone.” As Harold spoke the words, their truth became even more manifest.
“What do you mean?”
“The diary is gone. Destroyed. That’s got to be it. What other news would have upset Cale so much? Remember, in the hotel, he didn’t have the diary. In his two flats, he didn’t have the diary. In the suicide note we found in the British Library, he didn’t even say he had the diary, only that he knew what had happened to it.”
“So what happened to it?” Sarah asked.
“It’s gone. There never was a diary to find.”
“I don’t understand. Everyone agrees that Conan Doyle had written the diary, right? He’d written dozens of other volumes of the thing.”