CHAPTER 46 The Reichenbach Falls
“Wear flannel next to your skin, and never
believe in eternal punishment.”
– Mary Conan Doyle, to her son Arthur,
as recounted in his memoir Memories and Adventures
January 17, 2010, cont.
When Harold closed the diary, he realized that he was crying. His tears were dripping onto the hard leather cover of the book, mingling with a hundred years of dirt, dust, and a few specks of blood.
He’d read slowly, making sure that Sarah could follow along with him. Now they both sat freezing on the rocks, and they both knew everything. Sarah placed a hand comfortingly on Harold’s knee, and he found himself crying harder. He pulled the diary to his chest and let his tears fall on the dirt. He didn’t have the energy to conceal them. Neither Harold nor Sarah said a word.
After a few minutes, Sarah stood. Without speaking, she gestured along the path through the mountains. She wanted to walk. Harold didn’t object. He brought himself to his feet, feeling aches forming in his thighs and knees. He followed her in the darkness, up the path, higher into the snowy Alps.
He had no idea how long they walked. It could have been twenty minutes or two hours. They walked under the cover of starlight, through the snow, higher and higher. The exertion warmed Harold a little, and after some time he thought he was close to regaining feeling in his fingertips. Sarah sensed his cold, and despite her own she removed her coat and wrapped it around his shoulders. He didn’t thank her but only walked farther, higher and higher through the thinning air.
He wasn’t sure where they were going, and he didn’t care. He began to appreciate the cold in his bones, the cold freezing the tears on his face. The chill quieted his racing thoughts. He could only feel so much in his head, in his frayed and slow-beating heart, when the rest of his body was frozen. The thought occurred to him that if he lived here, if he set up camp in the mountains and never came down, he might be able to avoid all future feeling altogether. The plan sounded as reasonable as any other.
Before they came upon the clearing, Harold heard the sound of rushing water. Because of the darkness, they didn’t see the waterfall until they were only a few feet away from it. Harold felt the mist from the racing falls spray his face at the same time that he saw the cascading torrent of water through the trees. He could hear the water crashing against the rocks below, slapping against the hard side of the mountain every hundred yards until, somewhere far in the dark distance, the water landed in a churning pool and fed into a lake deep in the valley.
The Reichenbach Falls. They both stopped walking and stared silently off into the distance at what little of the falls they could see.
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said.
“Me, too.” Harold didn’t have an ounce of anger left inside him. He wasn’t sure how much of anything he had left inside him anymore.
“Are you happy?” she asked. “Are you glad you found the diary?”
Harold did not need to think in order to answer truthfully.
“No.”
Sarah reached across his body and took the diary from his hand. He loosened his fingers and gave it to her without argument or complaint. She stepped back from the ledge. She pulled the diary behind her, curling her arm like a pitcher, and overhand she threw the diary as far as she could into the darkness. They could almost hear the diary collide with the falls, as it was rocketed downward toward the cragged lake by the force of the water.
And then silence. Stillness. The hum of the waterfall and two sets of breaths, puffing in unison.
“Thank you,” Harold said.
Sarah reached for his hand and held it warmly in her own. There, staring into the night sky, they stayed, fingers intertwined. Harold squeezed as hard as he could, and Sarah squeezed back, each gripping the other’s hand until they felt their fragile bones were about to shatter.
CHAPTER 47 Farewell
And so, reader, farewell to Sherlock Holmes! I thank you for
your past constancy, and can but hope that some return has
been made in the shape of that distraction from the worries
of life and stimulating change of thought which can only
be found in the fairy kingdom of romance.
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
preface to The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes
August 11,1901
The workmen were tired. They had been at it all day, sweating through the August heat and dampening the armpits of their navy blue uniforms. Two days ago they had finished laying the twenty-foot-long main electrical cables from the Marylebone Station to Baker Street. The mains were thick and quite heavy, two copper tubes placed one inside the other and layered with brown wax. The whole thing was encased in heavy iron, and every time the men lifted a long section of cable between them, they’d grunt and feel the strain in their bulging necks. Yesterday a larger team had come to help raise the cables above the houses, laying them between the lampposts and over the two-story roofs. It had taken twelve men to spread their web of wires outward through Marylebone, slowly west to Paddington. Today only two workmen were left to remove the gas lamps atop each pole along Baker Street and replace them with electric bulbs. Late in the afternoon, as the sun melted into the taller buildings along Montague Square, the two sweaty, exhausted men took turns mounting their one ladder and unscrewing the tops of the gas lamps. One would stand on the ladder’s lowest rung, weighting it down, while the other would climb to the top. The poles had been connected to the nascent grid already, so all that remained was to connect the sockets to the positive and negative lines and then replace the bulbs. The wires kept slipping through their damp fingers, and when they would try to brush the sweat off on their work suits, they would leave finger-shaped stains of wax and dirt on the navy cloth. They were getting very tired.
Just after sunset, a few hours behind schedule, they came to the final lamppost, right before the corner of Igor Street and the park. The shorter of the two held the ladder from below, because it was his turn to do so, and the taller man ascended the eight vertical steps to the bulb. It took him only a few minutes to rewire the fixture, and by the time he came back down the ladder, every lamp along Baker Street had been wired for electricity.
After returning the ladder and tools to the back of their wide-bedded carriage, they walked to the Marylebone Station to complete the connection. Once they had connected the Baker Street line to the system, from the transformer room deep underneath the station, they made their way back to examine their work.
They turned the corner as ten thousand volts surged from the Deptford Power Station, nine miles away, through the Ferranti cables underneath the city and onto the shining expanse of Baker Street. It was a brilliant sight, and though they had worked for the London Electric Supply Company for a few years now, the first glance at a street illuminated solely by the searing electric bulbs still caused a brief shock. Every building, every alleyway, every dark and fetid cobblestone had been washed clean in the radiant light.
“Oi,” said the taller workman. “That’s it, then.”
“I’d say so,” replied the other.
“Lord, but it’s sure bright, isn’t it? I can’t hardly see the fog anymore.”
His partner simply nodded in agreement. It was as if a layer of gloom and dread had been stripped from the streets, leaving the city white and clear. But the vision of this white and sparkling street was odd, too, and neither man possessed the words to explain why. So much that had been hidden was revealed in the electric light, so much had been gained. But perhaps something had been lost as well. Perhaps, both men thought but did not say, a part of them would miss the romantic flickering of the gaslight.