Associates of Sherlock Holmes

THE PRESBURY PAPERS Jonathan Barnes

The college bade a reluctant if heartfelt farewell this term to one of its noblest and most accomplished sons. Professor C.R.H. Presbury, whose fame as an authority in the field of physiology burst long ago the banks of academe to become a national byword for intellectual rigour and clinical expertise, has chosen retirement following a recent, regrettable period of ill health.

His departure was marked by a brief ceremony, which was attended in considerable number by students and fellows and by sundry others whose lives have been enriched through interchanges of various kinds with the professor.

Presbury himself, a notably frailer figure than he who once bestrode the lecture hall, gave a warm speech in which he thanked the college authorities for their exemplary treatment of him in what he called “trying circumstances”. He also regretted deeply the absence of his daughter and her husband (who were, he said, now resident in the Americas) and declared his intention to leave the university town in favour of a small fenland village where he meant to live out his widower days in “contemplation of the highest of life’s callings”. It needs hardly to be said that he shall be missed greatly by all who knew him.

The overwhelming impression which is acquired during a visit to the village of SEATON LEIGH is one of stark inhospitality. Although not without elements of the quaint and picturesque – its inn, The Upright Badger being, for example, unexpectedly well-stocked and well-appointed – the place boasts a largely taciturn community and a flat fenland landscape. Lone and level fields extend in every direction, studded occasionally by severe dark hedgerows and glowering patches of woodland. There is little to divert that curious traveller who comes in search of the aesthetically pleasing (far better for our wayfarer to journey instead to the nearby homesteads of Baker’s Drive or Graverton) and nothing at all to suggest why, if one were not born to this cold agrarian realm, one should ever choose to make a life for oneself here.

Nonetheless, and against all odds, the village boasts a celebrated resident. Professor C.R.H. Presbury, the once-noted university physiologist, dwells in what was formerly a coaching inn, leading, it is said, an intensely private retirement and taking no part in the business of Seaton Leigh.

I do believe, however, that, during my visitation, I glimpsed him: a tall, defiant figure, stalking into the woods to take his evening constitutional, moving with determined but unfathomable purpose, like some weirdly animate scarecrow.

24th October 1911

Dear Professor,

It is my honour and privilege to enclose within this parcel those curious and singular books that you requested in your last communication, namely:

(i) The Secret Life of a Ballerina

(ii) A Schoolgirl’s Education

(iii) Confessions of a Flagellant

(iv) Further Memoirs of a Courtesan

(v) A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus

I trust that these volumes shall educate and enchant in equal measure. Should you require further additions to your library, pray do not hesitate to renew our correspondence. Until that time, I would remind you respectfully of the ceaseless necessity of discretion and tact.

Sent: 3rd January 1913

From: Scheherazade

To: Panjandrum

Subject located. Extraction begun. Expect further word soon.

More than a decade has passed since last I set pen to paper in this fashion. That was at a time before the delightful – if ultimately faithless – Miss Morphy came first within my purview, before the gentleman from Prague provided the chief instrument of my downfall, before the advent in my rich existence of that professional busybody Mr Sherlock Holmes and before the ignominious end of a career which cannot be characterised as having been anything other than amongst the very first rank. My life since those unhappy days, which saw the cessation of my engagement and the severing of all professional and personal ties of any significance, has been spent in quiet contemplation and solitary philosophical enquiry. I have been – let us not be circumspect – a long time indeed in the wilderness.

What, then, has occasioned my return to this journal, its pages, like the skin of its author, thin, worn and showing advanced signs of age? What has made me write once more of myself?

The answer is this: that an event has woken parts of my character that I had thought to have been forever buried, that the sight of a new face and the speaking of certain words has breathed again on embers in me and coaxed back into full flame the fires of an appetite which I have endeavoured in this long hermitage of mine to curb, to suppress and to cast aside.

It began this morning with a knock upon my study door. I was engaged in the perusal and study of certain antiquarian texts and, being cognisant of their fragility as well as their extreme rarity, I was careful to stow them away in the safest drawer of my desk before answering the bid for my attention with a sturdy “halloa!” It was, of course, Mrs Scott, my redoubtable, boot-faced housekeeper and maid of all work, the only representative of her sex nowadays with whom I pass any words of substance.

Her face was arranged so as to suggest an emotion of which I would not hitherto have thought her capable, namely a crude species of curiosity.

“Mrs Scott? What occasions this interruption?”

“You have a visitor, sir,” said she, her rustic origins evident in every elongated syllable. “A fine young woman.”

Even at these rare words I fancy that something shifted within me, that some new chain was forged.

“Did she give her name?”

In the manner of an angler presenting some oversized prize, Mrs Scott, with a decided flourish, produced a white business card. “See here.” And she passed the thing, with an odd admixture of wariness and pride, to me.

I looked down with considerable interest, callers of any kind being a rarity and those of this stranger’s sex and age unprecedented, and I saw written there four words.

The first, evidently the caller’s name, in bold type and gothic calligraphy, read:

Underneath, in more modern print, ran the legend:

“How very intriguing,” I said. “Now, really I think it is high time that you showed this singular young lady in, Mrs Scott. Don’t you?”

Given the consequences of so long and enforced a solitude, my imagination had, naturally enough, begun by this time to adopt the most fantastic postures. My breathing quickened and a raft of the most vivid and diverting imagery rose up before me. Those moments in which I was left alone in the study as Mrs Scott bustled in the hallways beyond were especially interminable.

Nonetheless (and how I find my hand a-trembling as I consign these thoughts to this secret depository) their sequel was to surpass even the most idealistic of my fancies. For, a minute or so later, the housekeeper returned and in her wake was a young woman of the rarest and most striking aspect, brunette, not more than five and twenty and in possession of a truly wonderful silhouette.

Her gaze met mine without the least sign of nervousness. She was dressed in a demure, even a somewhat antiquated fashion and her voice was gentle yet determined.

“Professor Presbury, I presume?”

I peeled back my lips. “I am most certainly he. To whatever do I owe this pleasure? Are we acquainted?”

That dear lady shook her noble head. There was something sweetly feline in the gesture. “I fear I have not until today had the pleasure of making your acquaintance in person. Although, of course, I feel that I know you through your work, so much of which I have read with the keenest interest.”

I waved away this compliment casually enough, although I admit that at the declaration I felt a distinct spasm of delight.

“Yet I do believe,” she murmured, something quietly imploring now in her big hazel eyes, “that you once knew my late father.”

“I may well have done,” I said. “Now what was that good man’s name?”

“Lowenstein,” she replied and showed me her sharp white teeth.

“Mrs Scott,” I said to that stout creature who had, throughout this conversation, lingered by the door. “Would you be so kind as to fetch Miss Lowenstein a pot of tea? Perhaps the walnut cake also? For this is somewhat in the spirit of a reunion, and we should mark it with all good things.”

The domestic nodded gruffly. Miss Lowenstein seemed delighted. “I do so love walnut cake.”

“Happy,” I said. “I am happy to oblige.”

“And yet?”

“Yes, Miss Lowenstein?”

“Today is not meant merely as a means by which we might revisit the past.”

“No?”

“No indeed, Professor. For I have come here in large part for a single reason – to put to you a most remarkable proposition.”

And so we sat and we took tea together and Miss Scheherazade Lowenstein put to me that proposal at which she had hinted. It is born, I think, at least in part from guilt at the role that her departed father played, however indirect and unwitting, in my fall from grace. It is, she says, loyalty that drives her, loyalty to her parent’s memory as well as a desire to restore honour to a family name, which is at present mired in disrepute. So she has sought me out to set things right. I have, after only the most perfunctory of protests, acceded to her request and I am, in two days time, to go to London where I shall be put up in the Bostonian Hotel in Bloomsbury and from where, Miss Lowenstein assures me, all that has been taken from me shall be once again restored.

More than that – the specifics of what is to pass between us – I shall not write here. To do so would be to subject them to the cold and unforgiving light of reality whereas at present they have still in my mind the qualities of phantasy and delight. Yes, they have about them the sense of some strange and wonderful dream, which has lingered long into the waking hours.

Sent: 4th January 1913

From: Panjandrum

To: Scheherazade

Proposition accepted and subject gladly lulled. Suite in the Bostonian to be prepared for 6th January.

Sent: 4th January 1913

From: Scheherazade

To: Panjandrum

Congratulations. You are indeed a patriot. Report to me again in London.

I have spent today in preparation, not only of the practical kind – baggage to be packed; Mrs Scott to be informed and appraised of my imminent absence; arrangements to be set in motion for the temporary shutting up of the house – but also of an emotional, one might almost say spiritual, sort.

There are parts of my soul that have long been left unvisited and it was to those that I tended this afternoon. Shortly before dusk I took a walk, as I have so often before, into those patches of woodland which abut this little village and there I took a moment to stand alone, to collect my thoughts, to reflect upon the errors of my personal history and – I do not flinch from such an admission – for the first time in far too many years, to pray. For an instant or two, I was lost in the gathering evening to something far greater than myself.

Then I awakened from my reverie, turned and hurried back to my isolated little home. Such higher thoughts I leave here in the fens. In London I shall be all of the body – a corporeal and not a sacred being, devoted no longer to penitence but rather, I fancy, to the furtherance of sin.

I write these words upon the train to the metropolis, the details of my long exile fading already into disagreeable memory. I think now only of what is ahead of me: of the Bostonian Hotel, of the rich and subtle pleasures of the city, of my particular appetites – for too long in abeyance – and of Miss Lowenstein’s white beguiling smile.

Telegram

Sent: 6th January 1913

From: Scheherazade

To: Panjandrum

Subject arrived safely. Eager to commence first stage. Cannot recall an easier corruption. Request, as discussed, immediate release of funds.

Telegram

Sent: 6th January 1913

From: Panjandrum

To: Scheherazade

Request accepted. Funds to be delivered in customary fashion. Thoughts of all the Service are with you.

Telegram

Sent: 7th January 1913

From: Scheherazade

To: Panjandrum

We have him. Ready to begin second stage.

You will forgive my absence from these pages in recent days. I have been engaged in alternative pursuits. I dare not provide complete details of my excursions even here. Let it suffice to report that the pleasure gardens of London are aptly named, that the diversions of Bloomsbury are various and plentiful, and that there is in this mighty capital no hunger that might not be anticipated, that might not be met with expertise and surpassed. To this I must add that Miss Lowenstein has proved to be an excellent and knowledgeable guide. It is difficult to imagine any father having been precisely proud of such a daughter but it is surely to be hoped that he might at least have respected her comfortable acceptance of her nature.

The two days that I have spent here, in this marvellous hotel, have been unusually pleasant ones, unparalleled in the great majority of my adult life. Yet I am no longer a young man. I have not the vigour of my former days. I grow tired and I grow stale and I recollect the words of the Bard when he wrote of that rambunctious trickster that desire should so many years outlive performance. I had accepted the truth of the matter – that this delightful and unexpected sojourn had come to its natural conclusion, that my spirits were truly spent and that I would shortly have to contemplate a return to Cambridgeshire. Certainly, I considered any debt that might have been owed to me by the Family Lowenstein to have been paid in full and with considerable interest.

It was with no small quantity of surprise, then, that I woke from a stupor this afternoon to discover that notable lady sitting at the foot of my bed with a small wooden box before her. I struggled upright and asked Scheherazade what it was that had brought her to my chamber in so unorthodox a fashion.

Her reply, at first, was perhaps a little cryptic. “I see you,” she said. “And I know you also.”

“Whatever do you mean by that, my dear?”

“Only this: that you wish, do you not, to stay? Here in Bloomsbury? That there are depths for you to plumb? Blank spaces on the map still to be charted? Fabulous, fertile islands to be colonised and made your own?”

I swallowed deep and hard at this but made the inevitable protestation. “I am old, my dear, simply too old and too weak.”

“Truly,” she said, “it is not so. You are familiar, I know, with the contents of this box?”

I craned my neck forward to see what lay within, although I do believe I already knew what I would find there.

A set of full phials. A hypodermic already prepared.

The lady’s voice was gentle but firm. “I have continued my father’s work. The serum has been intensified and improved. You would surely appreciate the artistry of the thing. You will reap – oh, shall you reap – such benefits.”

“The side effects,” I stuttered. “The things before, the things it made me do…”

“All gone now. It has been improved upon. There is nothing that this could make you do that you did not wish to do. The serum would be to you a tyrant no longer but rather a most willing and most biddable accomplice.”

“I… dare not…”

“You?” Scheherazade opened her eyes improbably wide, in near-pantomimic shock. “How could you of all people use such a word? I thought you fearless, Professor. Fearless!”

I bowed my head to demonstrate that I felt appropriately shamed.

“Please,” she said. “This is my present to you. My final gift. And so I ask once more, Professor Presbury, sir, will you take this serum?”

And, of course, I nodded and I said that I would, and I reached out for the tools of vigour and strength and newfound youth. And I have begun – so I happily suppose – the final tranche of this, my most pleasurable damnation.

Sent: 9th January 1913

From: Scheherazade

To: Panjandrum

Study proceeds apace. Subject a willing participant. Earliest results expected within hours.

It is often said, at least by certain worthies, that it is the youth of our present time to whom we must look for demonstrations of dissolute and impious behaviour. The events that took place last night towards the southernmost end of Dean Street would seem to stand in ironical rebuke of so conventional a suggestion.

Shortly after midnight besides a nest of lodging-houses of the most disagreeable sort, a minor conflagration was seen to begin, as well as a great deal of commotion. In particular, a flurry of coarse and violent language was heard from he who was subsequently found to be the source of the blaze, a gentleman who was also in pursuit of a very young woman, busily engaged in chasing her along the avenue. The scene was said to resemble some antique woodcutting or portrait from some latter-day Rake’s Progress.

Bystanders reported this noisy malefactor to be crouched over and almost barking in the manner of an animal. It was to considerable surprise, when the culprit was eventually run to ground, that the gentleman in question was discovered to be aged indeed, more than seventy and at least the threefold senior of his young quarry. Police were summoned (here we may imagine the disquiet of several present) and the amateur arsonist arrested. In such unexpected ways are the commonplace assumptions of our society upended and overturned.

Sent: 10th January 1913

From: Panjandrum

To: Detective Inspector Arnold Blakely, Scotland Yard

Understand you have our man Presbury in custody. Professor part of larger design. Please release forthwith without charge. Your brother on the square, Panjandrum

Dear Professor Presbury,

I regret to inform you that certain recent conduct upon your part has been brought to our attention and that, in consequence, we must request your departure from this establishment by six o’clock tomorrow. You will understand that we have the reputation of this hotel to consider at all times and we cannot be seen to indulge or tolerate (let alone condone) such behaviour.

I understand, sir that you were once a gentleman and so I should be most grateful for your total and discreet acquiescence in this matter.

There is much of the past few days which is now to me both murky and obscure. There are in that time elements which possess a quality of the oneiric, and others which I believe I can see in the crisp, cold light of day, to have been largely shameful. There is much that I have no desire to record here. That peculiar and unexpected incident which has just occurred, however, I surely have no choice but to set down.

Following a most unsatisfactory interview with the wearingly small-minded manager of this otherwise pleasant hotel in which he refused altogether to weaken his resolve or to consider any alternative course of action than that to which he is committed, I returned to my room in order to pack together my belongings and so prepare for my departure.

When I opened the door, however, it was to discover within a gentleman sat upon a chair, observing my entry with a look of something like watchful disapproval. We had met on only a handful of occasions, a decade past, during a period of my life much befogged and dimmed, yet did I recognise him at once, for this man’s fame precedes him as a mourner goes before a hearse.

As I crossed the floor he rose to his feet and extended his right hand. With his left, he smoothed his moustache, a brisk gesture which nonetheless, at least to the trained eye, betokened anxiety and even mild disquiet.

“Dr Watson?” I said. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

“You remember me, then?” His voice was full of that bullish determination to state the obvious which typifies the military mind.

“How could I not?” I replied. “After you and Mr Holmes took so great and uninvited an interest in my affairs?”

“A wholly neutral observer,” began the doctor, “might rather be inclined to suggest that the encounter to which you allude ended with our saving your life.”

“That may be so,” I replied with a forbearance that was, I think, something of a marvel. “Yet our acquaintanceship was a fleeting thing. Might I ask how you have found me and what is the nature of your business here?”

“Locating you, Professor, has not been difficult. One had merely to follow the trail of destruction that you have left in your wake. And as for the nature of my business, let me be quite clear. It is an intervention born of concern and of fellow human feeling. I have come here today to deliver a warning.”

At these words I felt a distinct surge of anger. “Whatever do you mean by such impertinence? Whatever is this absurd warning of yours?”

“I should close the door, Professor,” said he, “and sit before me. We do not have much time and the words I have to say to you now are of the most sensitive and significant kind. Indeed, if you pay proper heed to them, they will yet save your life.”

“Do you take me for a fool, sir?” I began and felt myself ready to tumble again into a paroxysm of righteous rage.

Yet Watson interrupted – “Professor!” – and I saw in his eyes not only absolute sincerity but also (and it was this which persuaded me to stay my words and, almost meekly, obey) something very close to fear.

So it was that I found myself doing as I had been asked and sitting opposite this unwanted visitor as that old storyteller began to speak.

“Let it first be noted that I am here today not on my own behalf but as an emissary from Mr Holmes.”

“Sherlock Holmes,” I breathed, perhaps more in the manner of a villain from the popular stage than I had intended. “It was my understanding that that jackanapes – that meddler-in-chief – had retired. That he drowses now by some Sussex fireside.”

“Your understanding, at least in regards to my friend’s retirement, is correct. Nonetheless…” At this, a smile of an uncharacteristically knowing, even sly, nature crossed my visitor’s face. “It is not Mr Sherlock Holmes who has sent me to speak to you today.”

“No?”

“Rather, I am present on behalf of an equally noble man: Mr Mycroft Holmes.”

I rummaged for a moment through that portion of my mental apparatus that is devoted to trivia before retrieving the necessary fragment of data. “The elder brother, yes? He who is reputed to dwell in the upper reaches of government?”

“Quite so,” said Watson. “Though I fear he is not now nearly as close to the centre of things as once he was. We are none of us – are we – quite as at home in this new century as we were in the last? We are all of us, I think, essentially Victorian.”

“On the contrary,” I said, adopting a pleasingly lofty tone such as I had for many years deployed in the faces of students too unwavering in their convictions, “it is my greatest regret that I was not born very much later. This new age of abandon suits me so very much more nicely than did those stultifying decades in which you thrived.”

“I confess myself surprised, sir, given the unmanly excesses of your biography, that the simple accident of your birthday should prove now to be the greatest of your regrets.”

I glared. “You spoke, I believe, of a warning.”

“I did.”

“Then pray deliver it. My courtesy is not without limit.”

My guest looked at this as though he intended to issue a rejoinder. In the event, he contented himself with the following, rather lugubrious words: “Mycroft cannot be seen to act in this matter. Therefore he must do so at one remove.”

“You are his cat’s paw?”

“Surely something a trifle more benign than that. Nonetheless he wished me to convey to you the extreme danger of your predicament.”

“I am in no danger, sir. My situation is surely the reverse of that state.”

“Professor, nothing is what it seems. The lady whom you know as Lowenstein has no true claim upon the name. Rather she is an agent of the War Office. She is employed as a singular agent for those extraordinary projects which have, given the present European situation, been granted tacit authority.”

I shook my head at the absurdity of it all. “You have spent too long in the pages of your own books. Such things do not happen in real life. Why should the lady lie to me in so bald a fashion? What possible interest would that office have in me? Besides, I find your pessimism concerning our continental relations to be positively dispiriting.”

“As matters stand, sir, there would seem to be little alternative to conflict before long. And as to the matter of the War Office’s interest in you – an office, might I add, against whose methods Mycroft stands vehemently opposed – why, surely that is obvious.”

“It is not obvious to me.”

“The serum, Professor. The serum! Do you not see its potential?”

“For the lending of additional vigour, perhaps, in elder males…”

“No, sir! Do you not see its possible military application?”

I gaped at the man for this wild flight of fancy. Yet was he persistent.

“Do you not see? They are experimenting upon you! They are testing your endurance, testing the effects of this new substance upon the only man in Europe to have regularly imbibed the drug. Imagine it, Professor. Imagine the scene. Battlefields swarming with soldiers who are more than human. More feral, more savage, more lethal than their Teutonic counterparts. Legions, sir! Legions upon legions of creeping men!”

With this barrage of lurid melodrama, the doctor had at last gone too far. I rose to my feet and said, with all necessary sombreness: “this, sir, is now intolerable. You do me and Miss Lowenstein a grave disservice.”

“Professor, I speak only the truth.”

“You speak slander and, I fancy, something very near to treason. Now, you have delivered your warning. I should ask you now to leave. Under normal circumstances I would request also that you bear my felicitations to your master, Mr Mycroft Holmes, yet so unworthy has been your conduct and so vile have been your insinuations, I cannot find it in my heart to do so. Dr Watson, sir, it is high time for you to depart.”

The old doctor stood up, looked sorrowfully at me, smoothed his moustache once again in that distinctive gesture and walked, slowly and wordlessly, towards the door. Once there, he turned back.

“As a scientist, Professor, you will know well what the next and final stage of their unnatural experiment will surely be.”

“And what, sir, is that?”

“They will test a thing to its very limits. To the point of its destruction. And beyond.”

I scowled in disbelief at the continuance of such folly.

“Good day, Professor Presbury. I should recommend immediate flight yet I fear you are now deaf to reason. Instead, I shall have to content myself merely by wishing you the very best of luck.”

And then he turned once more and he was gone, back to his dreams of the past, to wish himself resident again in that vanished epoch of gaslight and hansom cab.

Although certain of his more pungent fantasies have, naturally enough, lingered in my imagination, I have pushed the great majority of them aside. For I am quite certain that there can be no truth in any of it. Indeed, I am to see Scheherazade later today and to her I shall say nothing at all of this queer visitation. She will, I am certain, secure for me alternative accommodation and she has promised to take me once again upon the town. That she will have supplies about her person is to be expected.

Only pleasure lies before me now. I cannot – I will not – believe anything else. The story of the rest of my life will be one of pleasure and delight, of excess and of deep, dark, trembling joy.

It is a tragic fact that such discoveries as the one that was made in the early hours of this morning by the banks of the Thames in the vicinity of Waterloo are commonplace. A body was found, which appeared at first sight to be that of an elderly gentleman – another victim, it was thought, of old age, want, despair and that illusory comfort which is surely suggested to the desperate by the deep cold waters of our great river. Further inspection, however, revealed a more curious element to this seemingly well-worn tale.

The deceased was profoundly deformed, bent almost double even in death and possessing great and unnatural quantities of hair, as of those sported by certain simian denizens of the animal kingdom. That there is something freakish and abnormal in the business surely lies beyond all reasonable doubt, and the discovery of this ill-fated “Monkey Man” has already excited all manner of speculation.

Detective Inspector Arnold Blakeley, who is investigating the mystery on behalf of Scotland Yard, professed to this correspondent that his investigation is in its earliest stages. He considers the likeliest suspects to be found in the worlds of the circus and the carnival. It is in these disreputable quarters, he says, that all his energies shall be expended and he is confident that a plausible solution shall in time emerge.

Sent: 30th January 1913

From: Mycroft Holmes

To: Panjandrum

Noted with interest thorough failure of your Presbury project. I expect to learn shortly of its total cessation.

Sent: 30th January 1913

From: Panjandrum

To: Mycroft Holmes

Expectation unfounded. New alternatives soon to be explored. Suggest you consider retirement at earliest possible opportunity.

Sent: 30th January 1913

From: Mycroft Holmes

To: Panjandrum

Retirement impossible while such men as you defame good name of Empire.

Sent: 30th January 1913

From: Panjandrum

To: Mycroft Holmes

Not defamation; rather necessary protection. Project ongoing. Will brook no opposition.

Sent: 30th January 1913

From: Mycroft Holmes

To: Panjandrum

Useful phrase, much used by younger brother: Game is afoot.