The Fifth Heart (12 page)

“May I help you?” asked a pleasant-looking man with sharp-boned but ruddy cheeks and the tiniest-diameter spectacles Holmes had ever seen.

“I am looking for a magic-lantern projector,” said Holmes in his slight Norwegian accent.

“Very good, sir. For in-home purposes or larger commercial presentations—say in a music- or science-hall or general auditorium space?”

“To be put to relatively modest in-home use for now,” said Holmes, looking around admiringly at the rows of carefully lighted cameras, enlargers, glass-plate slide projectors, developing devices, and rack after rack of chemicals. The place had the quiet aura of a wizard’s shop. “Perhaps later,” added Holmes, “I will require a more elaborate projection apparatus.”

“To purchase today or to rent, sir?”

“To rent,” said Holmes. The irony was that he had no fewer than three specialized photographic-plate slide projectors back at 221 B Baker Street. He had used them for years for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which was to project and compare fingerprints or microscopically enlarged shard-ends of tobacco or cloth. But obviously he hadn’t taken the bulky and delicate projectors—or any of his hundreds of carefully labeled glass photographic plates—with him when he’d arranged to “die” along with the mythical Napoleon of Crime at Reichenbach Falls two years earlier.

The clerk, who announced that his name was Charles Macready—youngest brother of the late English actor William Charles Macready—and that it was his shop and a pleasure to wait on the Norwegian gentleman, led Holmes into a curtained alcove near the rear of the store where a cluster of black-metal and gleaming mahogany-and-brass projectors sat on carefully lighted shelves.

Mr. Macready touched a black-metal device. “This is the newest thing—the lamp is electric so no illuminant fuel is required. A seven-foot electrical cord. No smell of paraffin or fear of tipping over or overheating. The mirror above the electrical bulb focuses the light, you see.”

Holmes had noted that the Hay house was electrified, but he thought it would be undignified to ask that cords be hung from chandelier sockets. “I won’t require electric.”

Macready nodded and moved to a more compact black-metal-and-brass device. “Here is a Woodbury and Marcy Sciopticon. It uses a double flat-wick illuminant, fueled by kerosene, and you can control the height of the wicks for maximum light intensity on the images.”

“I think not,” said Holmes, stroking his chin. “What is that smaller one?”

“A very bright and sturdy little projector manufactured by Ernst Plank at Fabrik Optischer und Mechanischer Waren in Nuremberg,” said Mr. Macready. “But it takes small glass plates. What is the size of the slides you wish to show, sir?”

“Three and a half by five inches,” said Holmes. “Reduced by half from original plate size.”

Macready nodded. “Then I’m afraid the little Ernst Plank model will not suit your needs. It’s wonderful for small science-class presentations or home magic-lantern shows, but your presentation sounds more serious, more . . . panoramic.”

“Yes,” said Holmes.

“We have double- and triple-lensed projectors for special effects, especially when shown in a larger hall,” said the proprietor. “You may know that it allows the projection operator to fade from one image to the next, to overlay two or three images, and thus to give the illusion of movement if the slide images are consecutive in motion. They really act as a sort of motion-picture projector.”

Holmes shook his head. “I require only a good, solid, safe magic-lantern projector. What is this one?” Holmes touched the larger model with its boxes of mahogany-and-brass lenses and a rather beautiful red-leather bellows lens extender. The detective knew its worth because he owned one almost identical.

“Ah, yes, a very fine unit, sir,” said Macready, setting his blunt hands on the larger machine. “Made by Archer and Sons in Liverpool. It is illuminated using a limelight burner, so one must take special care—it burns very hot. But the images are spectacular . . . in small rooms or large halls. You see that each side has a square-hinged door opening into the illumination chamber as well as a blue-glass circular viewing door with a swivel glass cover. The Japanned metal top cover attaches the tall chimney-cowl
here
. . .”

Macready gently touched an oval aperture. “I have the cowl and chimney in the back, Mr. . . .”

“Sigerson,” said Holmes.

“You see, Mr. Sigerson, how easily the illumination unit slides right out with one easy pull of this brass knob.”

“I shall take it,” said Holmes.

“How many nights’ rental, sir?”

“Just two nights. I shall return it on Monday.”

“That works well since the shop is closed on Sundays, sir. So we shall charge for only one night’s rental. We would be delighted to have the projectors returned before noon on the workday they are due, if that is convenient for you, Mr. Sigerson.”

“Perfectly convenient,” said Holmes. He didn’t comment on the price when Macready quoted it but counted the dollars out from a rather absurdly thick wad of American bills he carried in his pocket. Holmes pulled the shopkeeper’s small pad closer, clicked open his mechanical pencil, wrote, and said, “Can you have it delivered to this address?”

Macready glanced at Holmes’s handwriting and said with a tone of even deeper respect, “Colonel Hay’s home. Absolutely, sir. It shall be delivered before five p.m. today.”

“Oh, and I’ll need fuel for it,” said Holmes.

“Included in the price, sir. The carrying bottles are foolproof and fireproof and set into their own wooden carrying tray. And may I compliment you on your choice, sir. Archer and Sons is a superb optical manufacturer and this unit works with such brilliance that the viewers almost think they are actually there within the frames of the photographic slide. This projector will serve you well whether you’re presenting your slides to a packed house of scientists at the Smithsonian Institution or in the Executive Mansion itself.”

Holmes smiled. “Those venues may have to come somewhat later in my schedule, Mr. Macready.”

N
ow Holmes was seeking out the worst slums in Washington, D.C.

He walked west through the southern reaches of one of these slums—Foggy Bottom—a low-lying industrial area hosting the city’s gas works, some still-working glass plants amidst the stone and brick remains of their closed brethren, and a diminishing number of odiferous breweries. The air here was thick enough and foul enough to justify the slum’s name, some of the industrial miasma clearly visible as a sort of swirling green fog. As with all of Washington, D.C.’s, worst slums, the inhabitants here built their shelters along the long, unpaved alleys. Many of the residents of Foggy Bottom were—or had been at one time—employed in these abandoned breweries and tumbledown manufacturing ruins, but the alleys were still lined with tin shacks and wooden hovels, many of them abandoned but others still housing families (or solitary, sullen men) too poor to move elsewhere. Along with the miasma that hung over Foggy Bottom, there seemed to hover a second fog of vain hopes that industry and living wages would once again return to the disintegrating neighborhoods.

Holmes found what he wanted near the southwest edge of Foggy Bottom: five rotting, peeling, once middle-class homes standing amidst high weeds on an otherwise abandoned block.

He chose his house carefully, walked around the back, and tested the still-intact rear door. It was locked. These homes were almost certainly for sale, although their former owners and current sales agents were living in a fantasy world if they thought anyone would buy them now for purposes of residence.

Using the small jimmy-tools from his folded leather purse, Holmes let himself in and wandered through the chilly rooms where wallpaper, once eagerly chosen with hope in some long-failed domestic future, peeled away from clammy walls like skin from a corpse.

Upstairs he found what he’d sought: a locked closet. Holmes jimmied it open, undid the clasp of his bulging briefcase, and brought out a change of clothes. When he was completely changed, down to his underlinens, Holmes folded his good tweed “Norwegian suit”, shirt, shoes, and underclothes into the briefcase, set the briefcase on the high shelf of the otherwise empty closet, and used his tools to lock the warped door once again.

There was no mirror left intact in the old house but it had grown dark enough out under the advancing storm that Holmes could check his appearance in one of the long windows in an empty upstairs room.

He was now a grubby American laborer—down to the thick boots and soiled Irish cap—complete with dirty waistcoat and baggy trousers held up with one suspender. He’d applied make-up to approximate months of grime to his face and hands and nails. Holmes allowed his hair to fall from beneath his foul cap at random, greasy angles and now even his carefully trimmed Norwegian-explorer’s mustache had been augmented into an overgrown American’s soup-strainer. Even his fancy cane, the outer sheath slid away, was now a rough walking stick with a lump of brass rather than sculpted silver at its head. Unless someone hefted that stick, they wouldn’t guess that it had a core of lead poured down its center and a solid lead sphere centered under the wood in the rough knob at the top. He still carried the French gravity blade in the pocket of his working-man’s trousers and kept the three photographs tucked securely in his shirt pocket.

Holmes went out of the old house, locked it behind him, and walked south toward the Southwest slums he sought, his stout stick banging against tilted sidewalk pavers and rough cobblestones as he went.

* * *

No trace of either the Norwegian gentleman he was currently passing as or the English gentleman he’d so long passed as was left as he walked the rough, dangerous streets of southwest Washington, D.C. His “disguise” as an unemployed, rum-reeking common American laborer did not feel strange on him. He had been pretending to be an English gentleman all of his adult life and sometimes the pretense grew wearisome indeed.

In the century and more to come from this moment in March of 1893, there will be multiple biographies written about Sherlock Holmes. Most will get his birth year—1854—correct. Most will write about how he and his older brother Mycroft came from landed gentry in Yorkshire. They will tell of his youthful education in a Yorkshire manor and his years at Cambridge. Almost all of these facts—after the year of his birth—will be incorrect.

Everything that future biographers—speculators—of Sherlock Holmes’s past assume as true comes from a few words quoted by Dr. John Watson and published in
The Strand
in a tale titled “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter”. The conversation between the doctor and the detective that particular lazy summer-evening had been running in its
“desultory, spasmodic fashion from golf clubs to the causes of the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic”
(note here that if Holmes had really not known that the earth orbited the sun, he hardly could have been chatting about the “obliquity of the ecliptic”) when Watson changed the topic to “hereditary aptitudes”.
The point under discussion
, Watson reported in his chronicle,
was how far any singular gift in an individual was due to his ancestry, and how far to his own early training
. In today’s parlance, it was a discussion about nature versus nurture.

Then Watson went on with his fateful four paragraphs:

This was the only time, in hundreds of thousands of words “chronicled by Watson”, that Holmes will ever mention his ancestors. It was the first time he ever mentioned the existence of his brother Mycroft, and Watson was duly astonished.

Yet nothing in this short “revelation” to Dr. Watson by Sherlock Holmes, other than Mycroft’s existence, was true in any real sense: not even the simple fact of his “grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist”.

There was, of course, a well-known French artist of the era, Émile Jean-Horace Vernet (1789–1863), whose specialty was painting scenes of battle and Orientalist-Arab subjects. Vernet’s most-remembered painting in Holmes’s and Watson’s time (and in ours) was his large canvas titled
Street Fighting on Rue Soufflot, Paris, June 25, 1848
. If Vernet is remembered for any utterance today it is from the time when a patron asked him to remove the image of an especially obnoxious general from one of his battle paintings. “I am a painter of history, sire,” Vernet is reported to have said, “and I will not violate the truth.”

But Holmes, in his recitation to Watson, certainly violated the truth; Émile Jean-Horace Vernet had three brothers and one younger sister who died of typhus when she was 7 years old. She could hardly have been Sherlock Holmes’s grandmother.

William Sherlock Holmes had been born in the Eastside slums of London and had spent the majority of his young years in those slums and on those rough streets. When the older Holmes summoned his barefoot, ragamuffin group of “street Arabs”—his Baker Street Irregulars, as he called them—he might as well have been summoning his much-younger self.

Future biographers will state with certainty, among other “known facts”, that Holmes’s father was either an invalided-out cavalry lieutenant named Siger Holmes or a member of the landed gentry named William Scott Holmes. Neither account has an ounce of truth to it. One famous biography of the Great Detective will have Sherlock’s father and the Holmes family inheriting a Yorkshire estate called “Mycroft” and will trace the family ownership of that grand estate back to the 1550’s.