Sherlock Holmes and the Shakespeare Letter

Holmes crawled around the perimeter of the hard floor on his hands and knees, peering into every irregularity in the stone, looking for listening devices that might be hidden. Next he examined the low ceiling, which consisted of two heavy beams holding up stone and plaster. At last he seemed satisfied. ‘I think we can talk,’ he said.

A moment later a dragonfly flew in through the open window. It hovered in front of Holmes, then in front of me. The beautiful creature irritated me and I took a swing at it – it darted away, hesitated, then swooped through the window opening and was gone.

Holmes stood close to me, ‘Reinforcements should arrive in exactly four hours,’ he said, ‘if Lestrade got my message.’

‘Then let’s hope he got it,’ I replied. ‘But why so late?’

‘Matters have progressed faster than I expected.’

The wall was several feet thick. I crawled to the outer window edge and looked down. I felt a little giddy. I turned my head and saw the graceful round tower. I crawled back into the room. By and by we got tired of standing. We sat down on the hard floor and leant our backs against the wall and made ourselves as comfortable as we could.

‘Until this moment,’ I said, ‘I have never really appreciated the advantages of furniture.’

Holmes took his briar pipe from his coat pocket and put it into his mouth, and he stared at the sky beyond the window, contemplating. He had fallen into one of his trances, so I did not trouble him with my thoughts.

I have seldom spent a more miserable two hours.

Finally we heard footsteps on stone, the lock rattling, the door creaking. Shotgun Abernetty stood in the door frame, with a sawn-off shotgun drooping in his left hand and a sneer drooping on his lips. ‘Get up,’ he said.

I got up stiffly. Holmes was already on his feet.

Abernetty decided to pick on me, the slow one. He gave me a shove. ‘Let’s go,’ he said, ‘and no funny business.’

He marched us down the long hard stairs, then through a series of rooms. In the library I noticed Holmes’s revolver lying on the table just where he had set it down. For a moment I considered making a dive for it . . . but the moment passed, and I felt disgusted with myself for having missed the opportunity.

Holmes walked a few paces behind me, and Shotgun was a few paces behind him. ‘I have been ordered not to harm you gentlemen,’ said Shotgun, ‘for they say you are to be permanent guests of Castle Mornay. But I don’t like taking orders, and I’d as soon shoot you as look at you. So no funny business.’

He marched us next through the laboratory to a door at the far end, then down more stone stairs until we reached the vaults beneath the castle. I could see activity ahead: two dark figures were lit by a single bulb. The bulb hung from the end of an extension cord that was looped over a beam. The bulb swayed slightly, bending the shadows of the two men. The men were laying a course of bricks across a niche in the outer wall. The niche was perhaps eight feet wide by three feet deep. A wheelbarrow of cement was nearby. As we drew near to them it was clear that the men were making a wall, slapping down cement and bricks. Already the wall had risen two feet from the stone floor.

‘Step over the brick wall, gentlemen,’ said Bart Gray, emerging suddenly from behind a pillar. ‘Everyone has his niche in life, and that one is yours. You are looking at your new quarters – a little cramped, perhaps, but cosy.’

Suddenly I wished that I was back in an armoured personnel carrier in Afghanistan, being shot at by the Taliban. How much more pleasant a death that would be than this! For it was plain what Bart Gray had planned for us. Holmes and I stepped over the wall and stood in the niche. Our backs were to the outer wall of the castle foundation. Kneeling in front of us were two men, presumably Alf and Dunwoody, who were slapping down bricks to make the wall that would erase our existence from the world. Behind those two stood Shotgun Abernetty, grinning. Behind him stood Bart Gray, who looked rather out of place in his sport coat and white cashmere sweater and grey slacks. Bart stroked his blue necklace with two fingers. Then he pointed at us with a delicate air. ‘You know, I always had a fondness for Poe.’

‘I can see that,’ said I.

‘The Cask of Amontillado was always my favourite.’

He stepped forward suddenly and leant towards us. He plucked the briar pipe out of Holmes’s breast pocket. ‘These little bombs are rather expensive to make, so I’ll have this one back, if you don’t mind.’ He slipped the pipe into the breast pocket of his own sport coat. ‘If you had been a better actor, you would have said the words that would have ended your life more pleasantly than it now must end. Oh, well. I tried! Yes, and it all works out for the best . . . for me. We will reprogram this little briar pipe bomb and use it to eliminate some tedious pipe-smoking intellectual in Prague or Islamabad – or wherever pipe smoking is still in fashion. No, no! I have a better idea! I will give it back to my oppressively ignorant stepfather, Professor Hugh Blake. Sir Hugh has been off his head for years, despite the best efforts of my brother and me to set him straight. So maybe the only cure now is for his head to come completely off.’

He maundered on awhile, telling us about his own tastes in literature, and how his brilliant brother had formed his view not only of literature but of the world. Meanwhile, the brick wall had risen to our waists.

‘I will tell you my scheme,’ he said, finally. ‘All that I have in store for you.’

‘Since you are so sporting,’ said Holmes, ‘I will tell you my view of schemes. Perhaps you should have spent less time reading Poe, more time reading Burns. Do you mind if I quote to you a stanza from the finest poem in the English language? No, of course you don’t –

‘I do,’ said Holmes. ‘All in all, Burns’s poem is a finer, truer, more complete poem than any one of the sonnets of . . . well, you call him Bacon, everyone else calls him Shakespeare.’

‘I have never heard anyone say such a thing!’ cried Bart Gray. ‘It defies common sense. It betrays a great want of taste on your part, Mr Holmes. Bacon’s lines are incomparable:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day . . .’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Holmes. ‘Many of Shakespeare’s sonnets are entrancing. But though they all have their beauties, none of them – not sonnet 73, not 29, not 116 – has the reach, the humanity, the vision that Burns’s poem has.’

‘Burns better than Bacon! That is laughable,’ said Bart Gray.

‘I do not say Burns is a better poet than Shakespeare,’ said Holmes, ‘only that he has the better poem.’

And while those two bandied words about Burns and Bacon and Shakespeare, warring with each other like clever schoolboys, the practical world was closing in on us. The course of bricks had reached chest level.

‘My scheme,’ said Bart, ‘which I assure you will not go a’gley, is this: when the second to the last course of bricks is laid, I shall toss this little canister of gas’ – he held it up – ‘into your cell, to knock you out for a short while, just to allow – you understand – the cement to harden. When you awaken you will be in the dark forever. We will then pile rubble from the castle pilings against the brick wall we are building, to obscure it from view. It will comfort me, in gala days when my castle is once again alight with comrades and laughter, to know you two imposters are slowly turning to skeletons beneath my happy life. I will tell people that one of the finest victories of my life rests forever in the foundations of this very castle. They will think I am speaking in metaphor, of course. They will join me in toasts. They will rejoice with me. My mother will be especially pleased. She loves cryptic statements.’

‘You certainly are a curious case, Mr Bart Gray,’ said Holmes. ‘I don’t think I have ever seen your like. When I look at you I cannot tell whether your dominant defect is ignorance or delusions.’

‘Ignorance!’ laughed Bart Gray. ‘That is certainly a novel accusation, particularly coming from a man who has just been outsmarted by me. And what sort of delusions do you imagine dominate me, Mr Holmes?’

‘Delusions of adequacy.’

‘But no one has ever called me anything but the cleverest of the clever, Mr Holmes. You are quite alone in your opinion.’

‘Nevertheless, I am right. For at this very moment you are proving that you are unobservant, imperceptive, and incapable of imaginative thought. The truth is, your lack of intelligence will soon cut short all your schemes, deny Al Qaeda the SADISM system they so desire, end your life, and ensure the sale of this castle to strangers.’

Bart Gray shrunk a little, as though Holmes’s concise and forceful statement had wounded him. He began fidgeting, blinking. I wondered what had come over him. ‘You are very certain of yourself, Mr Holmes.’

‘There is a passage in Epictetus,’ said Holmes, ‘that you should have paid more . . .’

‘Holmes, Holmes!’ I cried, for I was unable to restrain myself any longer. The brick wall was rising fast before us. ‘Is this the time to be discussing Greek philosophy!’

‘Mr Holmes,’ said Bart Gray, in a tone of wheedling penitence, a sudden shift from his exuberance of a moment before, ‘I am not an evil man, merely an unfortunate one. Like you, I suffer from chronic boredom. Unless I have excitement, action, danger, I feel dull, useless, almost dead. If Chance had put into my path a means of satisfying my desires by doing good, I would have done it. I might, even, have been a great detective – as your hero, Sherlock Holmes, was.’

‘I am Sherlock Holmes,’ said Holmes.

Bart Gray laughed. ‘No, you are a grotty little imposter, whom no one believes, and no sane man could believe. I sympathize with your tastes in literature, in that you admire the narratives of the great Dr Watson, but I cannot forgive you for denigrating the name of a great soul with your tawdry tricks and disguises, or for tarnishing a great literary tradition of true-life biography.’

‘And is that why you have decided to kill me in so cruel a manner?’

Gray laughed. ‘You shouldn’t object – after all, you are already dead . . . and have been since 1914.’

‘Bring in some more bricks,’ grunted one of the workmen.

The other workman walked off. Shotgun Abernetty followed him, passing in front of the bulb and making a huge shadow on the wall. By and by I could hear them pulling a pallet of bricks across the stone floor.

Bart Gray pulled the letter from his inside coat pocket. ‘Here, let me entertain you with this bit of tripe, as we close the wall on your pale and ridiculous faces.’

‘Yes, read it from the beginning,’ said Holmes. ‘My friend and I will soon be out of here, and I should like to hear just a bit of it before we leave.’

I could scarcely believe my senses. Holmes acted as if the contents of the Shakespeare letter were the most important thing in the world to him. Dunwoody was trowelling cement on to the next tier of bricks, and the other man, Alf, began slapping bricks in place on top of the layer of cement. The wall had risen now to within a foot of the ceiling, and I could see only the letter and fingers and face of Bart Gray as he began to read:

‘Florence, Casa Figlia, March 1592.

‘My Sweete Emilia,

‘You do infect me more than plague would do, and would that I had never run so far from it that I am far from you; for though I be here, still I am home at heart, so I have gained little. This eve I crossed the Old Bridge and into the Piazza della Signoria where I did pause in the shadow of the statue of Cosimo . . .’ And there he stopped reading and tilted the letter to see it in better light below the fold, and then he continued reading. He read and he read. Holmes listened intently to every word, but I did not for I was getting very nervous, and I had suddenly lost my interest in historical holographs. Finally I could stand it no longer, and I said. ‘Really, Holmes, do you have a way for us to get out of here?’

‘Certainly,’ said he. And as he spoke I could see only his eyes and forehead, for the gap was now only eight inches high.

‘Then do you think now might be the time to tell me what it is?’ I said.

‘Absolutely right,’ said he.

‘What is it then, please, Holmes . . . if you would be so kind.’

Holmes turned his face away from me and looked directly at Bart Gray as he said in a very loud voice, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson!’