Gaslight Grimoire_ Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Barbara Hambly [18]
Holmes smiled down at me. “I see you’ve grasped my methods, Mary. Since the matter is one of financial peculation, it should be easy enough to bring home to him, and to put him out of the way. Even had I not spoken to Bobbie, the culprit would have been simple to find. Quite elementary, my dear…”
The word stopped on his lips, and his face changed, in the starry twilight of that crossroads, as he recognized me at last. First enlightened, then filled with a rush of comprehension, as he understood at last why I had come to be so free within the Neverlands, followed by pity and grief. And it seemed to me that I no longer looked up so far at him, though as I’ve said he was always far taller than I. But it seemed to me that I was as he saw me, not my child self, nor even the woman I’d been when first we’d met, but a gaunt and shorn-haired invalid in the final stages of consumption.
“My dear.” He put out his hand, and where once it had felt cold against the healthy heat of my child-hand in dreaming, now his was the warm one.
“Don’t worry,” I said gently. “I’ll be returning to John, at least for a short while.”
In his face I saw his knowledge, of how short that time would be.
“Take care of him,” I said, simple and matter-of-fact.
“Of course.”
“It’s been good to have an adventure with you,” I said. “I always wanted to. They never let girls.”
Holmes opened his mouth to reply — almost certainly with some sentence beginning, The female of the species … then thought about the words, and closed it again. At length he said, “That has been my loss.”
We were silent, on that crossroads island, the dark bridge that led back toward my own room — and to Baker Street, for him — disappearing into the star-sprinkled gloom before our feet. In the other direction I could still see the Neverlands, sparkling in sunlight and joy.
Holmes asked, “Will you be all right?”
“Oh, yes. Peter will look after me, and go with me the first part of the way. It is the one thing he always does.”
He nodded, knowing this to be true. “Until we meet again, then, Mary.”
And we went our separate ways.
His Last Arrow
His Last Arrow
by Christopher Sequeira
The following is transcribed exactly as it appears on many handwritten sheets of paper. The original document itself was the sole contents of a plain brown envelope that had at one time been sealed with wax, which was found amongst a large selection of items in a house in Crowborough, East Sussex, in England. The envelope and many items of value were believed to have been stolen property, accumulated by a gang of burglars who were apprehended after successfully robbing several houses in the vicinity. Some of the goods the thieves had taken appeared to have come from the home of the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, however, when the brown envelope was proffered to the late author’s family, and it was noted that the seal was broken, a legal representative of the Doyle family examined the documents and announced the papers had never at any time been in the possession of the family, and then took the unusual step of expressing the view in writing that any attempts to claim otherwise would meet with legal action.
In 1894 I had returned to Baker Street following the failure of my marriage. I had concealed the full ignominy of my situation by revising the beginning of a story that was just about to see print in The Strand magazine so that the tale began with a contemporary reference to the ending of the union as a ‘bereavement’. This was artistic sophistry, of course,