Chapter 2 ― Irene Adler's Challenge (Part 3)

I visited 221B Teramachi Street one week later.

Mary had gone out in the morning, saying that she was seeing an old friend from boarding school, so I was alone when a boy arrived with a message from Mrs. Hudson. That was to my benefit, for what I did next I was able to do without Mary’s scrutiny. I hurriedly concluded the rest of my appointments, hung a closed placard on the door, then caught a hansom and was off to Teramachi Street.

It was a grey, chilly day, and the trees which lined the embankment of the Kamo wore leaves stained a rich crimson. Mrs. Hudson was waiting when I rang the bell and showed me in a nervous excitement.

“They’ve gone for the day, have they?” I asked.

She nodded vigorously. “They’ve gone for a picnic on Mt. Daimonji, and I doubt they’ll be back before the evening. They claim they are seeking a tengu to teach them its wisdom.”

“A tengu!”

“That’s right. I can’t fathom what could be going through their heads.”

I could not help the deep sigh which escaped my lips. These two men were among the foremost minds of their fields in detection and physics respectively, and yet the answer to which all their wisdom had led them was to seek the mentorship of a tengu? My indignation gave way to pity. The situation was clearly quite dire.

“You’ve already sent word to Lestrade?”

“Yes. He arrived earlier and is waiting on the second floor.”

I quickly went up the stairs accompanied by Mrs. Hudson. Lestrade was warming himself at the fireplace in Holmes’s quarters. I could hardly recognize his glowing face when he turned his head, so changed was it from our last encounter. A sparkle had returned to his formerly clouded eyes, and his cheeks were flushed and ruddy.

“Lestrade!” I cried. “You seem to have made a remarkable recovery.”

“Yes, I feel as though I’ve found the old spring in my step again.”

The advent of Irene Adler had been nothing short of a godsend for Lestrade. Now that his rivals on the force were having their thunder stolen by Adler, everyone had forgotten about Lestrade’s slump. The other inspectors were mortified at the thought of having to bow and scrape to someone whom they had previously scorned as a rank amateur, though her superiority was now quite apparent to all.

“I’ve been cutting out all of the articles in the paper about their blundering and putting them in a scrapbook, which I keep underneath my pillow. I’ve never slept better, as you can see in my new constitution. I must remember to thank Miss Adler.” Here Lestrade leaned forward with an expression of great sincerity. “But don’t get it wrong, I always have been and always will be a friend to Mr. Holmes. As you see, I rushed here as soon as I got Mrs. Hudson’s message. Things seem to have gone pretty far astray.”

Lestrade was perfectly familiar with Holmes’s newfound habit of taking on cases and leaving them unsolved. In fact, a number of those aggrieved petitioners had formed a Victim’s Association, and only yesterday had marched to Shinchō Yard to lodge a complaint. Holmes had not solved any of their cases, and he would not tell them about the status of his investigations, they complained: what could he possibly be doing?

“It was all we could do to placate them and send them on their way,” explained Lestrade.

“They have every right to be angry. For Holmes to agree to help them, then leave them in the dark…only to traipse off with Professor Moriarty for a picnic to Mt. Daimonji? He’s lost his mind. We must act,” I declared.

I explained to Lestrade what had transpired at Madame Richborough’s. If her words were to be believed, Holmes’s slump was tied to one of his cases from long ago, and that case was connected in turn to the girl in the crystal ball. But I doubted that a direct questioning of Holmes would lead anywhere. In the first place he hated spiritualism, and furthermore he would surely be unwilling to dredge up what was surely a painful memory.

“Holmes and Moriarty will be out for some time. Let’s split up and look through Holmes’s records for any case that might fit the bill. Once the facts of the case are clear we can return to Madame Richborough and ask her to guide us on,” I said.

But Inspector Lestrade folded his arms and frowned. “I won’t claim that spiritualism is all smoke and mirrors, but I would think twice before consulting Madame Richborough. The police have had our eye on her, but with so many of the rich and powerful among her faithful, we haven’t been able to act. You’re aware that Lord St. Simon backs her?”

“Then do you have another suggestion?” inquired Mrs. Hudson.

“Well, no…” admitted Lestrade.

“I realise that ransacking Holmes’s records is not the ethical thing to do,” I said. “Yet if we stand here and twiddle our thumbs, Holmes will surely be defeated by Irene Adler. You need Holmes to break out of his slump. Or would you prefer to chase sheep rustlers around Ohara no Sato all day?” I said.

After a moment’s thought, Lestrade nodded with conviction. “Very well. At any rate I have nothing to lose.”

We dragged from Holmes’s bedroom a large tin box. It was full of papers tied up into separate bundles as well as other assorted knick-knacks tossed haphazardly inside, all pertaining to past cases. These were all done before my biographer had come to glorify me, he had once tantalisingly mentioned, though he had never once shown me the contents of the box.

The distinctions of the case we sought were these: one, it was over ten years old; two, a young woman was involved (and likely died); three, that Holmes had failed to unravel it.

Lestrade sifted through the documents, cross-legged on the carpet.

“How old was this girl in the crystal ball?” he asked.

“Hard to say; I would place her in her mid teens,” I answered.

“A girl of good upbringing, if I had to guess,” mused Mrs. Hudson. “She had lovely golden hair.”

For the next two hours we sorted through the mountain of documents in silence. It was onerous work. Holmes had never been in the habit of arranging his records, and his scrawling hand was exhausting to decipher, but once you did you could hardly help but become engrossed in the fascinating details of the case. Eventually we succeeded in going through the entire contents of the box, but found nothing resembling the case in question.

“Perhaps Holmes has beaten us to the punch,” I wondered. We scoured every inch of the room, but found nothing more.

“That’s that, then,” announced Lestrade, clapping the dust off his hands. “For all we know it could be sitting in a strongbox at the bank or burnt to cinders in the fireplace. And it may be that this case that Madame Richborough spoke of never existed to begin with.”

“Mrs. Hudson, has Holmes been anywhere lately?” I asked.

“No, he’s remained perfectly sequestered here.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. The only time he goes outside is to visit the shrine to Benten…”

Mrs. Hudson and I turned to look at each other at precisely the same time.

We jostled to get out of the room and rushed up the stairs to the roof. A cold autumn wind was moaning, and the overcast sky threatened to open up as we crossed the barren roof towards the Benzaiten shrine. It had been there before Mrs. Hudson had acquired the lodging house, and aside from the deity which was enshrined in it we knew nothing about where it had come from. It had appeared to be abandoned, the exterior cracked and peeling, but with a few repairs by Mrs. Hudson and a fresh coat of paint on its scarlet pillars it was as pretty a shrine as you could find anywhere. Holmes visited it nearly every day, and the coins he tossed liberally into the offertory went directly to fatten Mrs. Hudson’s pockets.

I pressed my hands together before it, then opened the doors and searched inside.

“Well?” Lestrade asked anxiously.

My fingers brushed against an object.

“I’ve found something!”

Upon pulling it out I discovered it to be a worn, leather-bound notebook. We silently exchanged glances. Raindrops began to patter down from the ashen sky. Retreating to Holmes’s room, we opened it and discovered that it detailed a case that had occurred in the house of Musgrave―twelve years earlier.

　　　　　　　◯

The Musgraves are an old family with long roots in the west of Kyoto. Theirs was a cadet branch which had separated from the Musgraves of Kamigamo in the 16th century and built their manor house at Hurlstone. The northern Musgraves had gone extinct following the troubles of the 17th century, so nowadays when people talk about the Musgraves they mean the Musgraves of Rakusei. The previous head of the clan, Robert Musgrave, had been a man of considerable talent in business and politics, and rather than limit himself to the management of the ancestral estate had found great success diversifying his interests into steel and chemical manufacturing. It was his sturdy efforts which had led to the success of the Great Exhibition which was held in Kyoto fifteen years ago, and the famous Crystal Palace which was its centrepiece is still a popular attraction today at Okazaki Park. “Progress and Harmony for Mankind”, the slogan of the exhibition, is also the motto of the Musgrave house itself.

Robert Musgrave wed Elizabeth Holdhurst, the second daughter of that family, but she was prone to illness and difficult in temperament. She cared little for Robert or household affairs, and their marriage was a rocky one. At the time of the incident, Lady Musgrave had already passed away, leaving a son and a daughter. The elder, Reginald, had been twenty, and the daughter Rachel fourteen.

Miss Rachel inherited her mother’s sickly disposition and rarely left the house. Yet she was a child of great intellectual curiosity and vigour, and was better acquainted with the library at Hurlstone than any other. Like her mother she was a skilled pianist, and showed interest in astronomy and scientific research. At every full moon she would ascend with her brother Reginald to the rooftop and make observations of the celestial orb. Though she could not attend school, she took great delight in inviting the students of the Shishigatani boarding school to tea twice a year.

After Miss Rachel’s fourteenth birthday, her father began to invite the scions of great families from all over Kyoto to banquets at Hurlstone Manor. The ostensible pretexts for these galas were many and various, but his true aim was to find a suitor for Miss Rachel. She was, after all, the most eligible young lady of the noble families of Rakusei, with a dowry to match, and so the sons of the nobility came flocking like moths to a flame.

Yet notwithstanding Lord Musgrave’s own enthusiasm for the subject, finding a suitor was a harder thing to accomplish than he had imagined, said the servants, for Miss Rachel had no interest in marriage and was quite distressed by her father’s quest. Thus things came to an impasse.

The incident occurred early in the winter of that year, on the same day that the students of the boarding school were to visit Hurlstone. For generations the Musgraves had been the trustees of that school, and each year they would invite several students for a tea party hosted by Miss Rachel, following which the students were free to spend time in the library or drawing-room as they pleased.

Miss Rachel was a perfectly charming hostess, as she had been in every year before. But as the evening drew nearer and the students gathered in the parlour to await the carriages which would bear them back to their dormitory, Miss Rachel was nowhere to be found. When it became clear that she would not arrive in time to see the students off, the butler, Brunton ushered them all into their carriages, then directed the staff to search the house from cellar to garret.

But Miss Rachel had vanished completely from the manor.

When Lord Musgrave returned from a business engagement he was informed of the disappearance of his daughter. Her brother Reginald was travelling abroad. Yet Lord Musgrave delayed in reporting the disappearance to Shinchō Yard, no doubt from a horror of the private matters of his household being dragged before the world.

The inspectors arrived at Hurlstone Manor the following afternoon, a full day after she had gone missing. Under their supervision a complete search of the grounds was conducted, and all the staff questioned; each of the boarding school students who had attended the tea party and suitors from the banquet was thoroughly interrogated. They even dredged the pond, yet at the conclusion of this exhaustive investigation not a single clue had been found.

Sherlock Holmes was summoned to Rakusei about two weeks after the disappearance of Miss Rachel. Reginald Musgrave had been an old friend of Holmes from college, and had always regarded his extraordinary powers of reasoning highly. Upon his return from his travels he learned of his sister’s disappearance, and frustrated by the police’s inability to find any hint of her whereabouts promptly requested the aid of Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes stayed at Hurlstone for some time conducting a thorough investigation of his own. The journal we found detailed the day-by-day proceedings of his search and the theories which he examined. But even his efforts found no conclusive evidence, and gradually his writings slowed to a trickle.

His stay at Hurlstone was quite unpleasant. It was a difficult case, like grasping at clouds, and it was made even more difficult by Lord Hurlstone’s refusal to cooperate. Face-to-face he would berate Holmes as an “amateur detective”, treatment which often put him into conflict with his son Reginald. Holmes noted in his journal: *There’s something curious about Lord Musgrave’s hostility. *

The final entry in the journal detailed a small incident which happened at Hurlstone. The strain of the lengthy investigation kept him up at night, and he paced the unlit corridors, his mind racing. As he wandered the deserted manor he quite unexpectedly came upon a young girl. Before he had time to react, the girl fled. Convinced that it was the missing Miss Rachel, Holmes blew the whistle which he kept around his neck, rousing the entire household.

With the help of the staff Holmes caught the girl, only to discover that she was one of the students who had attended the tea party. She was apparently something of a troublemaker at school who had developed delusions of grandeur about being a detective. I could solve Miss Rachel’s disappearance, easy! she had thought to herself, and snuck out of school back to Hurlstone.

Lord Musgrave was furious. Not only did he lodge a demand with the principal that the girl be expelled, he roundly castigated Holmes as a useless fool, which clearly struck a nerve. Imbecile! Holmes scrawled in the journal.

But the truth was that Holmes failed to solve the case.

The final entry concluded with the following words: Where can my God-given talent have gone?

　　　　　　　◯

Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson, and I went straight to Pondicherry Lodge. As before, the butler brought us into the waiting room.

“What a room!” Lestrade gawked. Through the massive window which faced the garden, rain-misted Higashiyama appeared much closer than it really was.

As the mansion was at the foot of Higashiyama, Mt. Daimonji was not quite within view, but it must also have been swathed by the dense drizzly fog. I presumed that Holmes and Moriarty must be at this very moment drenched, tramping over fallen leaves in search of their tengu. The mere image was pathetic. Between mountain spirits and spiritualism, surely spiritualism was the more dependable of the two?

In truth, I was beginning to believe in Madame Richborough’s powers. Rachel Musgrave had been fourteen when she disappeared from Hurlstone twelve years ago: small in stature with blonde tresses, and wearing a simple white dress. That matched exactly the figure which we had seen in Madame Richborough’s crystal ball. It could not be mere coincidence.Whether her life had taken by misadventure, or her own hand or that of another, if she had indeed passed on to the spiritual realm it was no wonder that no one had been able to find her for the past twelve years.

Furthermore, if the cause of Holmes’s slump was indeed spiritual, it would explain perfectly why we had not been able to solve it. That was beyond the realm of detectives and doctors, and only the powers of a medium such as Madame Richborough would be able to lift Holmes out of it.

“I wonder how much longer it’ll be?” wondered Mrs. Hudson.

Perhaps the madame’s previous consultation was dragging on, for after we had waited some time the butler still had not come to show us into her chamber.

Lestrade reclined on a settee and pored over Holmes’s journal thoroughly.

“I remember the Musgrave case, for I was dispatched to search for her. But I never knew that Holmes was involved as well.” He looked up from the pages and stared morosely out of the window. “It was a strange case. With one of the great houses of Kyoto involved we were under a great deal of pressure to unravel it. Lord Musgrave is a politician of great influence, and the Home Secretary must have hounded the superintendent day and night to get it done. They sent all of the top inspectors to search every nook and cranny. But the wind changed quite suddenly. The bulk of the task force was recalled from the investigation; we hadn’t found a single clue before they ordered us to pull out of Rakusei.”

“That is quite odd. Did you ever learn what was behind that decision?”

“I’d just joined the force, so that was all I ever learned of the matter,” murmured Lestrade, his voice becoming soft. “Something must have perturbed the upper echelons of the force. Before long they’d closed down the entire investigation, leaving the Musgrave disappearance unsolved. I suspect whatever happened had something to do with why Mr. Holmes failed to solve the case himself.”

“You think someone didn’t want the case to be solved?”

“Someone well-placed, in my opinion,” said Lestrade ominously.

Twenty years on, Miss Rachel’s whereabouts remained shrouded in mystery. Her disappearance cast a long shadow on the Musgraves. Her soft but indelible presence had held the household together, and afterwards Lord Musgrave threw himself into various enterprises, each more foolhardy than the last, and none meeting the success of his previous ventures. It was thought he sought to forget the loss of his daughter. But Robert Musgrave never recovered from that heavy blow, and last summer he had died a broken-hearted man, leaving Reginald to take over his affairs.

“Poor girl, that Miss Rachel,” said Miss Hudson. “I suppose if she were still alive she would be about Mary’s age now.”

“But I don’t understand,” frowned Lestrade. “Why would Mr. Holmes go to the trouble of hiding away this notebook?”

“Perhaps he was embarrassed that someone would come across his failure.”

“But having read it I wouldn’t say it was so miserable a failure as that,” frowned Lestrade as he flipped through the notebook. “As a detective he did what he could, and it doesn’t appear that he made any fatal errors. In comparison to the case of the Red-headed League, it was practically a success. Why, after twelve years, would this case weigh on him again, much less drive him into a slump? It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“Trust in Madame Richborough,” said Mrs. Hudson soothingly. “She will explain everything.”

Madame Richborough’s previous clients must have finished their consultation, for we heard voices in the corridor, and a moment later two women came into the waiting room. “Why I never!” Mrs. Hudson cried. As soon as I laid eyes upon their faces I was astonished. It was Irene Adler, and my wife Mary.

“What are you doing here, John?” she asked.

“I could ask the same of you. Didn’t you tell me you were going to meet a boarding school friend?”

“Yes, and I did. Irene was my classmate.”

I was astounded to hear this. Mary and I had thoroughly discussed the topic of Holmes’s drubbing at the hands of Irene Adler, yet never had she mentioned that she knew Irene personally, an omission which clearly now had been intentional

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

“You never asked,” she smiled sweetly.

“Fancy us meeting here!” said Mrs. Hudson. “We’re here to consult the good madame about Mr. Holmes.”

I nudged her arm. We were in the presence of Holmes’s rival, and nothing good would come of us letting her know how precarious his situation was.

Mrs. Hudson gulped and stopped talking. I noticed Irene Adler glance at Mary, who gave a small nod.

Just then the butler came in and announced, “The madame awaits.”