Hindhead and London, 1898

The new study was lined with windows, which gave out over the gardens to a stretch of heath and from thence to the valley all the way to the Downs. The walls were richly paneled and hung with curious watercolor paintings of fairies parading in gardens, of enormous birds talking to people smaller than they were, of an angel, wings spread, hands folded, hovering over a field, of strange pale horses, skeletal men, and helpless women, their skirts streaming behind them, cascading like a waterfall from the rooftop of a tall, gloomy building. On one wall a few harpoons were displayed together; a stuffed falcon brooded on a bookcase; a bear skull had a corner of the mantelpiece to itself. The desk was massive and dark; the carpets thick and Belgian. It was a study befitting, at long last, what Conan Doyle had so precipitously become, an author of wealth and reputation. For the past three years he had traveled abroad, living in hotels and, on his return, in rented lodgings, and during that time he was constantly wrangling with architects, deranged neighbors, builders, lawyers, tradesmen of every stripe; and there were problems with the electricity, the heraldic arms in the great stained‑glass window of the entry, siting the stables, procuring the furnishings. He had hired a coachman and bought a landau and two horses, paying extra to have the family crest displayed on the carriage and the harness. Bills poured in, for laying the cellar, sinking the well, erecting the engine house for the electricity and the cottage on the grounds, for other outbuildings, landscaping, paving; it was an avalanche requiring constant attention to details, and the burden of it all fell entirely on him, as his poor wife was, had been, would be, very ill.

And now, at last, he was in residence, and so was she, plying her needle patiently in the room above his study. They both had the south view. He sat at his desk, in his comfortable flannel suit. The electric lamp cast a steady light on the page before him. He was composing a letter to his mother, asking her for the third time to come to his new house for Christmas. His pen scratched, making an audible whisper in the quiet April afternoon. Did I tell you that Sidney Paget is coming down to paint my picture for this year’s academy?

His mind wandered; the pen stalled. What would he wear for his portrait? Would Paget insist on formal wear, or could he be taken in his flannels? Outside his window a croaking band of ravens marched into view, keeping a loose formation like soldiers on maneuvers. Raucous creatures with eyes as shiny as the black stone of Mecca, big as cats and just as fearless. He never saw them without thinking how grand it would be to discover a white one among them, and he never had that thought without the image of the unfortunate Miss Petra popping up like a disturbing jack‑in‑the‑box in his mind’s eye.

His white crow.

He didn’t feel responsible for what had happened; how could he? He had hardly known the woman, though she had mightily impressed him. Myers had made the arrangements in concert with Dr. Bishop in Philadelphia. Doyle had gone off on his tour, confident that he had put her in the hands of professional, qualified investigators who would have been, he still believed, awed by her powers. On his return from America, he was in London only a day before heading off to Davos to join his invalid wife, his children, and his sister. It was a year before they settled in yet another rented house near the site of his future mansion, and a few months after that before he communicated with his friends at the SPR. Miss Petra, Myers informed him, had not arrived. There was some question as to whether she had gotten on the ship at all, as her hosts in Brooklyn admitted they’d left her on the dock. But her luggage was aboard and scattered about the stateroom; one steward said he might have seen her. The Cunard authorities were understandably reluctant to admit that one of their passengers had gone overboard without anyone noticing, and Myers himself was of the opinion that, as he didn’t know what she looked like, she might well have milked the society for her transatlantic fare and simply disappeared into the crowd on the dock. She evidently had no family – no one was looking for her. Cunard held her luggage for someone to claim, but after a year they disposed of it. As Doyle rehearsed this defensive explanation, one detail refused, as it always did, to jibe with Myers’s theory. If she had wanted to fleece the SPR for her passage, why would she have left her luggage in the stateroom?

He’d asked this at once, and Myers had replied impatiently, “Why, to make us all think she’d gone overboard so we wouldn’t seek her out. She wanted to disappear.”

It wasn’t a foregone conclusion, but he found it hard to credit the confident little woman he’d met with such relentless cunning. It was equally difficult to imagine her willfully going over the rail of a ship. She had betrayed no signs of depression or even agitation. She had, in fact, struck him as unusually composed.

Perhaps Myers was right, and his white crow had always meant to fly away.

At some signal they alone apprehended, the belligerent congregation outside his window burst into the air and swooped off toward the town in a squawking black swarm. Doyle returned his attention to his letter, scribbling a few last lines about his brother’s shoulder injury. If she wouldn’t come to see his house, perhaps the temptation of Innes in a sling would bring her round. Or did she really prefer spending Christmas in her cottage on Bryan Waller’s estate, fussing over his Christmas pudding until it was just as he liked it?

He didn’t write this last bit. Instead he signed himself devotedly , folded the page, and slipped it into the envelope, which he had already addressed. This he placed atop another, larger envelope, in which was secreted a square card bearing a message that began, My own darling girl . She would be in London in three days, and so, incidentally, would he. The dreamy thoughts that ensued were interrupted by a timid knock at the study door. Irritation sounded firmly in his command, “Come in.”

It was Vanderhoek, his little Dutch page, as he liked to call him, begging, as always, his pardon, but there was a lady calling and she’d sent in her card.

“A lady?” he said. He wasn’t expecting a visit from a lady. The young man handed over the card, stepping back at once in his eagerness to appear unassuming. “What manner of lady is she?” Doyle asked, turning over the card, on which the name Matilda Briggs was printed in square black letters.

“A tall lady,” replied the servant. “Most elegant in her dress and refined in her manner. But I believe she is a foreigner.”

“But?” said Doyle.

“She has an accent, sir. I don’t identify it.”

“Could it be German or Austrian?”

“I think I could tell that, sir. I believe she is not a German.”

Doyle dropped the card negligently upon his blotter. “The name means nothing to me,” he said. “Did she state her business?”

“She said she had information on a matter she believed to be of interest to you, sir.”

Doyle chuckled. “Elegant in her dress?” he repeated.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well,” he said, “show her in. I like to keep up with the fashions.”

The Dutchman went out and Doyle busied himself in taking up a few books stacked on a table between the fireplace chairs and stowing them on the mantel. Then he returned to his desk, drew out a sheet of paper from the drawer, took up his pen, and wrote the words “a foreign lady calls.” He could hear the familiar, always encouraging sound of skirts rustling against the parquet in the hall, coming steadily closer, but he kept his eyes on his page, starting a doodle of a horse, until Vanderhoek announced, “Miss Briggs to see you, sir,” at which point he laid the pen down with just the finest shade of reluctance, and, narrowing his eyes, looked up at the shimmering form hesitating in the doorway.

Now this is elegance, he thought. Miss Briggs was a column of heliotrope, silver, and gold, from the gleaming crown of ash‑gold hair fastened in a love knot with a silver comb to the tips of her embroidered kid boots peeking out from beneath a full gored skirt of deep purple silk with a sheen to it that called to mind the surface of a mirror. Her pouched bodice, high‑necked and long‑waisted, was of heliotrope satin with a complex of tucks, each tacked into place with a running stitch of deep orange, a pattern repeated in the folds of the tight muslin sleeves from elbow to wrist, and at the inset of the gigot bulge at the shoulder, which was not so full as some he had seen. Doyle was not a fan of the gored skirt, it so often resembled a bell, but this one fit like wax over the hips, cascaded in folds to a full base, and gathered at the back to give the illusion of the now unfashionable bustle – how he missed the bustle. Furtively he noted the details of this costume – he would give a full account of it to his sister Lottie – but he stood up at the same time, coming out from behind his desk with a pleasant surprised smile, such as he didn’t doubt this lady was accustomed to seeing. Her face was lovely, though not English. Her complexion was fair, her eyes deep set, hawkish, dark, almost black, her chin was a little heavy and her nose rather sharp. Her full, lightly rouged lips looked designed to bestow fond kisses. French, he thought from the look of her, and now he was eager to hear her accent. He had only a moment of anticipation, for as he took her hand she said, “Dr. Doyle. I so appreciate your willingness to see me, as I’m sure you have many demands upon your time.”

Not French. “Not so many,” he said. “And, in fact, I was just thinking of having a break for tea. Will you join me?” He indicated the chairs before the empty grate. She nodded agreeably, gliding past him, and perched like a fluttering dove on the indicated cushion, her long back stretched forward into the room. “With pleasure,” she said. She placed a silvery beaded bag he hadn’t noticed on the table next her.

“You do me honor,” he said, stepping into the hall to signal the hovering Vanderhoek and send him off in search of tea.

Miss Briggs didn’t move, though her eyes followed him as he closed the door and crossed the carpet to take the seat opposite her.

“Now,” he said. “I’m curious to hear the reason for your visit, Miss Briggs.” He noted two details as she replied. First, she lowered her eyes when he said her name, second, that she had a scar on her forehead, descending from the hairline, an old wound that had undoubtedly required stitches.

“I’m by way of a messenger,” she replied. When she hit the double ss she turned it into sh , which gave a shushing sound to the word. Not Italian, certainly. “I’ve come at the behest of a friend who must remain nameless. She is in possession of an object she believes will be of interest to you.”

“I see,” said Doyle. “What sort of object is it?”

“I believe it’s a book.”

“But you don’t have it with you.”

“No,” she admitted. “My friend wouldn’t entrust it to me. She wants to put it in your hands herself.”

“Is it extremely valuable?”

“You may think so.”

There was a tap at the door. “Here’s our tea,” said Doyle, rising to let in Mrs. Corrie, who bustled about, taking in the pretty visitor with surreptitious glances and giving Doyle a curt nod as she went out. He returned to his chair, smiling to himself. The servants were working out wonderfully well. He’d hired them all in London and hadn’t regretted for a moment the expense of bringing them down to Hindhead. They were city‑bred and knew what was what. He resumed his seat and poured out tea. There were oat biscuits on the tray and marmalade, his favorite, put up by his sister Dodo from the shipment of Seville oranges he’d sent his mother. “Does your friend think I would be interested in purchasing the volume? Sugar?”

She accepted the cup, holding it out for one lump of sugar. “I believe she means to give it to you. She has a great respect for your work.”

Doyle sat back in his chair, stirring his cup, looking thoughtful. He was thinking about several things at once: the revelation, when Miss Briggs moved her legs to cross them at the ankles, that her petticoat was of mauve silk shot with gold, the impenetrability of her accent, the clearly spurious “friend” for whom she pretended to be acting, the likelihood that Matilda Briggs was not her real name. “I really must ask you,” he said. “I hope you won’t take it amiss, but you speak with a charming accent that I fail to identify, and I flatter myself that I’m good at that sort of thing, so I’m wondering where you might have learned your English.”

She smiled, revealing strong white teeth packed in so tightly that the canines were twisted. “I’m from the island of Madeira.”

“Of course,” he said. “Portuguese is your native tongue.”

She nodded but made no comment.

“I have a fond memory of Funchal Bay,” he said. “I was a surgeon on an old steamer bound for Africa. We’d had a week of heavy weather, so the harbor lights – this was years ago, and I was very young – were a welcome sight, as you can imagine. I remember the pretty town; the hills rising behind it, and over all there stretched a lunar rainbow – quite a magical phenomenon I had never seen before. Nor have I since. Have you ever seen a lunar rainbow, Miss Briggs?”

“No,” she said indifferently. “I grew up in Santana, in the north.”

So much for reminiscence, he thought, and natural wonders. “Is it your first visit to our shores?” he asked.

“Oh no,” she replied. “I’ve been here often. I have family connections in Sussex and a few friends in London.”

“You are staying with your friend, then. The one who has the book.”

“I always stay at Morley’s when I’m in London,” she said.

“Yes, it’s the best,” he agreed. “When we go down as a family, we always stay there. It’s comfortable and unpretentious.”

“Yes,” she said.

He was conscious that his interest in his attractive guest had faded. She was too immobile, too monosyllabic, and he hadn’t much interest in her mission, which evidently involved his going to some unknown woman’s house to receive the last thing he needed in the world – another book. He wished he could simply tell her to go away now, but rudeness to ladies was not in his character.

“Will you have a biscuit?” he asked, purposefully leaving the next conversational gambit to her.

“No, thank you,” she said. She sipped her tea, her dark eyes flashing over the cup rim momentarily, and he thought, Is it possible that she’s as bored as I am? She set the cup down and slid her beaded bag into her lap. “I won’t take up any more of your time,” she said. “My friend asked me to deliver this message to you.” She snapped open the bag and extracted a folded envelope. “I believe it contains information about the book. You may decide for yourself if you wish to pursue it. She will make no further attempt to contact you, you may be assured.”

He raised himself from the chair, reached out to take the envelope, sank back down, then came up again, this time to his feet, as she stood before him, slipping the chain of the bag over her wrist. “It was so kind of you to invite me to tea,” she said. “Truly, I expected to be turned away at the door, and I’ve left the cab waiting. But now I can tell my friend I’ve had tea with Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle and put her message into his hands. She will be immensely gratified.”

He made for the door, as she evidently expected to pass through it, and pulled it open before her. Relief and gloom vied for dominance as he followed her into the hall. He felt like a rejected suitor in his own home. “Let me see you out,” he said. As they passed the billiard room, he thought to say, “Here is the billiard room,” because he was fond of pointing out the delights of his house to visitors, but as she didn’t so much as glance at the open doorway, he decided against it. In a moment they were upon the gravel drive, where the cab was indeed waiting, the driver napping in his box in the afternoon sun. Doyle was alongside Miss Briggs now and hastened ahead to open the carriage door and hand her in. “I apologize for interrupting you again,” she said. “My friend isn’t able to go out, and she was so certain her book would interest you, I couldn’t refuse her. I gather it has some bearing on a long unsolved mystery.”

He felt a chill about the heart. “Did she write the book?” he asked.

Miss Briggs laughed. “Oh no. I don’t think she could write a book. She’s nearly blind.” She slipped her hand into his and lifted her boot to the step. “It was such a pleasure to meet you here at your beautiful home.”

At last, a remark he could entertain. “You are most welcome,” he said. Then, as she settled herself in the interior of the cab, he closed the door and spoke sternly to the driver, who was rubbing his eyes with his fists. “Look sharp,” he said. “This lady is going to Morley’s Hotel.”

When he got back to his study, he found he had the folded envelope in his coat pocket. “An unsolved mystery,” he muttered, tearing open the flap impatiently. It occurred to him that Miss Briggs had not once mentioned Sherlock Holmes – a point decidedly in her favor. He drew out the folded page and flapped it open. It took scarcely a moment to read it. He carried it to his desk and laid it open on the blotter, staring down upon it with a knitted brow. In the center was a simple line drawing of a fish, with a hook and line stretching up from the protruding lip. Neatly printed in the fish’s body were the initials A.C.D. At the bottom of the page, two words writ large in red ink with a calligraphic pen comprised the message: MARY CELESTE .

“Not that again,” he said softly.

* * *

At supper he failed to mention his unexpected visitor. His wife, having slept in the afternoon and finished a bit of needlework, felt well enough to join the family at the table, and she drew the children out about the events of their day, so the subject of his didn’t arise. He had slipped the cryptic message into his desk and out of his mind, reproving himself for having wasted time better spent on his new novel. This was the best, the most original, work of his life, and he was already anxious about its critical reception. It concerned a man who is tempted by an old liaison to betray a gentle, loving wife of many years – a domestic drama – and as such, utterly new terrain. He only wanted the children to stop chattering and his wife to ascend to her aerie so that he could get back to it.

In the next few days Miss Briggs and her heliotrope imposition crossed his mind lightly, and with it the name of the ship, and with that the recollection of his own connection to the Mary Celeste . It was fifteen years ago that he’d written the story in South‑sea, hoping to bring in a little money. He’d placed a few stories, one in Bow Bells and a few in All the Year Round , making two pounds here, five there, then he’d written a ghost story based on his Artic adventure, “The Captain of the Polestar,” and sold it to Temple Bar for … ten pounds, was it? So he thought to try another spooky tale. The public, he knew, demanded a strong plot, adventures at sea went well, also ghosts and mysteries of all kinds. Why not put them all together? A ghost ship. The Mary Celeste . A survivor’s tale. Through the shifting mists of his imagination, the image of the ship hove into view, a few of her sails torn away, but otherwise in perfect trim, coming into the wind, then falling away, at the mercy of the currents and the wind, and no one aboard. When the trial at Gibraltar was in the news, there wasn’t a schoolboy in Britain who hadn’t asked himself the unanswerable question: Why did the crew leave the ship?

He’d meant no harm. He was desperate for money; it was that simple. He could easily have gotten a loan from his rich uncle, but it came with strings attached to the pope and he was through with that. The Jesuits had driven the love of Christ right out of his soul and he wouldn’t pretend to be a believer, no matter what it cost, no matter how his mother protested. The family had withdrawn their support – well, let them, he told her.

Writing that story had filled a few pleasant days when there was nothing to eat but potatoes and no patients ringing his bell. The bell that never rang – he could have spun a mystery out of that. He sat at his table recalling his African adventure, Captain Wallace and the Negro American consul – Garner? Garnett? – a civilized and erudite gentleman who evidently harbored a resentment so profound against his native country that he had dragged his dying body across the sea to die in Africa. Doyle had taken up his pen to sketch out his impressions, to set out upon a tale. What he hadn’t done was any research.

He wasn’t thinking that the captain of the Mary Celeste might have a family who wouldn’t be pleased to see their lost loved ones treated to summary execution. All he had wanted was to entertain the public and especially to attract the attention of James Payn at the Cornhill , and he’d been successful beyond his dreams. Payn had paid twenty‑nine guineas for that story. He could still feel the relief, like cool water washing over his shoulders, when he’d opened the check. Twenty‑nine guineas! It was half a year’s rent.

That story had changed his life, but as his name wasn’t on it, no one knew it for some time. For a brief period he followed the flutter of reviews and opinions, the little fuss about what it was, a true account or a fantasy, the joy when all the London papers reported the telegram from the proctor at the salvage trial in Gibraltar, who was evidently still hot on the trail of the mystery. Solly Flood , the item ran, Her Majesty’s advocate‑general at Gibraltar, telegraphs that the statement of J. Habakuk Jephson is nothing less than a fabrication .

The success of Jephson’s “Statement” didn’t make it easier to sell the next story – James Payn turned down the subsequent three submissions – but it made it easier to write it. A door he had been knocking upon for years had flown open before him, and he was ready and eager to pass through.

* * *

Miss Matilda Briggs called on a Saturday, a fine April day when spring beckoned to summer with its spritely allure, but by Monday, when Doyle went up to London to make arrangements for a jaunt to the Continent, the wind was wet and the air chill. He dropped his bags at the Reform Club, ran out to his banker, and returned in time for supper with his comical friend James Barrie, who always had enough hilarious theater gossip to get them through to cigars. When they had crossed the mosaic floor beneath the darkening crystal dome and stepped into Pall Mall, they found the rain had stopped and a thin fog settled in. They went out for a stroll regardless, pausing at Trafalgar to enjoy the glow of the lamps, the cab lanterns like oversized fireflies, the eerie faces of the horses materializing from the white vapor and disappearing into it again. Barrie went on to the Strand and Doyle turned back, thinking he would have a look at the papers before retiring, and there he was, at the very door of Morley’s Hotel. Out of the dull fog in his own brain, Miss Briggs and her cryptic message emerged, as ghostly as the horses’ heads. The porter held the heavy hotel door open before him. Uncertain of his own intentions, but with the ticklish and pleasing sensation of following a lead, he turned in to the familiar lobby and approached the desk.

A few guests, lounging about in the deep couches and chairs scattered across the wide expanse of carpet, cast languid glances as he passed. He heard one woman say to another, “That’s Conan Doyle.” His spine stiffened, he lifted his chin and dropped his shoulders, his stride widened; he was invigorated by the consciousness of who he was. Unfortunately the clerk at the desk, a dull young man, didn’t recognize him, forcing him to make his inquiry as if he were a person of no consequence. “Would you mind telling me,” he said, as the fellow presented a simulation of attention, “if you have a Miss Matilda Briggs staying with you.”

“I’ll see,” said the clerk, pulling the register in close and bending over it so that his large nose nearly touched the page. High myopia, Doyle thought. Best not trust him in the kitchen with a knife. He inspected the clerk’s index finger, moving down the list of names, and there was the proof; two thin white scars, and an unhealed cut on the thumb, a nasty slice still red and slightly open. “We’ve no Matilda Briggs,” said the young man, not looking up. “We have a Miss Sophia Briggs, but she checked out this morning.”

This was odd, thought Doyle. Why would she change her first name and not her last if she hoped to escape detection? Now the clerk looked up from the book, making his face a bland mask of subservience. “Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?”

Meaning, thought Doyle, Would you please be gone, you daft old dog, snooping around after a woman who has slipped out on you, as you deserve .

“No,” he said. “No, thank you for your trouble.” As he was turning away, a voice from the far end of the counter called out, “Dr. Doyle, sir,” and he followed it to find Jeffrey, the desk manager, who knew him, who knew his poor wife and the children and even his mother, and who never failed to ask him when the public might expect a new “masterpiece” from his pen. This reliable and efficient Jeffrey approached, cheerful and expansive, his bald pate gleaming in the diffuse light of the electric lamps, the wide white expanse of his immaculate shirtfront bulging with the pride he took in his station. “I’ve been on the lookout for you, sir,” he said, pausing in his passage behind the counter to pull an envelope from a box beneath the wall of keys. “The lady said she thought you’d be in sometime today, and I was to give you this message.” He swept the bemused clerk aside with a wave of one hand, brandishing the envelope with the other. “And here you are,” he concluded.

Doyle reached out to receive the envelope, which he tucked into his frock coat pocket without looking at it. “Thank you, Jeffrey,” was all he needed to say.

“Very welcome, sir. Happy to be of service. Family all well, sir, I hope?”

“Very well,” he said.

“And we’ll soon be seeing a new masterpiece fresh from your pen, I hope, sir.”

“Not too soon,” he replied, because Jeffrey amused him. “I’m working in a new vein.”

“Not a Sherlock Holmes vein then, sir.”

“I fear the great detective has few of those left in him,” he replied.

Jeffrey’s eyelids fluttered, taking in the pun, savoring it. “Have you bled the fellow dry, sir? I surely hope not.”

Doyle chuckled. “Not completely,” he said. “But he is somewhat anemic and I fear may require a transfusion of fresh blood.”

“Well, if it can be done, sir,” Jeffrey said, “you are the doctor to do it.”

“I’m hoping it won’t come to that,” replied Doyle. “For the time being I’m recommending citrate and bed rest.”

“Bed rest is never amiss, sir,” agreed Jeffrey heartily, “as I’m constantly reminding the wife.”

Remarkable, thought Doyle, how skillfully this manager had brought the conversation to a convenient and agreeable close. “Very right,” he said, and with a brief exchange of thanks and best wishes to the family, he was on his way out the door. As he sailed across the carpet, nodding to the doorman, who flung the portal open before him, he could feel the pointed edge of the envelope protruding from the shallow inner pocket of his coat, pricking irritatingly against his sternum.

The actors will come regardless of danger to encourage and applaud sixty‑five giant rats of Sumatra dancing in the road.

For the fifth time Doyle read this sentence; the entirety of the enigmatic message left for him by the exasperating Miss Briggs. He turned to the envelope – hotel stationery, Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle printed neatly across the front – noting for the fourth time that the address was written in different ink and by a different hand than that of the single sentence on the page inside. So Miss Briggs wasn’t working alone; she and her accomplice were having him on. What he found more disturbing than the message was Miss Briggs’s evident confidence that he would appear at the hotel to claim it. How could she be so well informed of his whereabouts? He had entered the hotel on a whim because he happened to be in the neighborhood. Her visit to his home had not been – she must know – a great success; she had failed to charm him. He had, in fact, found her wanting on nearly every score, apart from beauty, and even in that she was too icy and humorless to kindle any spark beyond the natural interest aroused by her figure, her face, and her style. The card she’d delivered for the friend – and clearly now there was a friend – wasn’t provocative enough to move a busy man to more than a few moments of recollection. The fish, the name of a ship, his initials. It was nonsense, and this message was more nonsense. They thought he was a fish and they could make him bite.

“They’ve been reading too many detective stories,” he said, folding the page and stuffing it back into the envelope.

He resolved to give it no more thought and stretched out on his bed, his brain abuzz with travel plans. In a few days he would be in Rome. His brother‑in‑law had written to say Wells was there, and a dinner planned – it would be a gathering of authors and the talk would doubtless be of politics and war. Wells had fantastical ideas, some of which were as practical as the umbrella. But the Naval Office ignored him, possibly at their peril.

In the morning he breakfasted alone at the club, feeling, as he buttered his scone, the absence of James Payn in the world. He was gone to his reward only a few weeks previously, and this was Doyle’s first occasion to be in London without a visit to Maida Vale. He mused upon their long association, which had begun all those years ago when he was a struggling young doctor, churning out stories by gaslight, laid low for days on end by the microbe that had climbed aboard his body in Africa and the neuralgia that made light unbearable. His thoughts drifted again to that first acceptance. The Cornhill , it was the gold standard. He sliced his sausage in three neat pieces and his mind sailed upon the Marie Celeste back to the message he’d left in his room. Giant rats of Sumatra. Were there giant rats in Sumatra?

After his breakfast he had an hour before the travel agent’s office opened, so he returned to his room. There was time to get a note off to her, to tell her of his plan for their meeting, to tell her of his longing for a meeting every minute of his day. On the desk the envelope – it was clearly some sort of silly female prank – caught his attention, and he read the queer message once again.

The actors will come regardless of danger to encourage and applaud sixty‑five giant rats of Sumatra dancing in the road.

It was a code, he thought. Of course, that was obvious. He tried the first letters of every word – t a w c r o d t e a a s f g r o s d i t r . He shuffled a few letters, got Crows eat fast with some letters left over. Not much to be made of that.

He read it backward; nothing there. Clearly it wasn’t mirror writing.

He pushed it away. Nonsense.

Was it every other word? Actors come of to … No.

And then he saw it. It was as clear as a windowpane – every fourth word.

Come to sixty‑five Sumatra road .

* * *

Why not? That was the question that got him to Sumatra Road that afternoon. He had cleared up his travel business, dined with his agent, and his afternoon was his own. As always, before a meeting with her, he was restless. Their reunion – public, as required, brief, as necessary – was scheduled for the following morning; he would meet her train and escort her to her sister’s house near Regent’s Park. They would have twenty minutes in the cab, half an hour if there was, as he prayed there would be, traffic.

So rather than wander the streets or drowse about at the club jabbering with any gentleman who happened to be at loose ends, why not take a pleasant drive to West Hampstead, where, the club porter assured him, the housing market was being cornered by such a lot of Jews and bohemian types a workingman might wonder what country he was in?

The fog had cleared off, the sky, a flat gray sheet with a smudge of yellow in the west, promised nothing, and the air was freshened by a westerly breeze. He could walk across the park and find a cab at Lancaster Gate. He was curious about the area, the bohemians and the Jews, about the promised book, and he wanted to demonstrate to Miss Briggs that he had cracked with dispatch her childish code. Some paltry species of honor had come into play, and it spurred him on.

One knew, without trying to, that the great thrumming metropolis was spreading, that grand country estates had been swallowed up by building associations, that the appetite of the working classes for a neat housefront and a walled yard had no limits, and that tradesmen and clerks of all sorts now schooled themselves in the finer points of freeholds and leases, but as his cab turned in to the third long rank of redbrick terraced houses, their identical bowed windows like drooping eyes looking out at the hip‑high stucco walls punctuated by identical iron gates, he grasped for the first time the magnitude of the development. He saw no signs of Jews or bohemians; in fact few humans of any condition were about on the bleak, treeless pavement. Everything was fresh, even the geraniums in the upper‑story window boxes looked brighter than the ones in town, and there was something dulling and cruel about all this newness. Behind the neat, narrow housefronts the residents were packed in tight, though not as they were in the stinking, overcrowded slums of Shoreditch or Cheapside, where poverty made the rules and the street was often safer than the wretched domicile. Here they were packed in decorously, like shiny little fish lined up in tins, and they were packed in willingly, because the point of all this clean brick and glass was that they were not poor, starving little fish anymore, and living in this place proved it.

The horses’ hooves clopped briskly on the long expanse of Dennington Park Road, and then slowed as the cab turned onto Sumatra Road, the last street before the rail tracks. In fact, as they made the turn, Doyle could see that the wee yards of these smaller, taller houses backed right up to the tracks. The tracks, he thought, which carried the trains, which moved the men who lived in the houses that Dennington built.

Number 65 Sumatra Road was distinguished from its neighbors by a Mediterranean panache. The small front plot was abloom with geraniums. Fragrant rosemary bushes pruned into pyramids defined the four corners, a hedge of lavender lined the walk, a lush bougainvillea overpowered a trellis fastened to the wall, and two enormous pots of exotic striped cannas occupied pride of place on either side of the door, which was painted an unusual sea‑foam blue. Doyle alighted from the cab and asked the driver to wait, as his visit would be a brief one. He didn’t want to get trapped in this monumental maze of brick with no easy way out. As he strode up the walk, he noticed the curtain at the window of number 64 dropping back into place. Neighbor‑watching. There must be a lot of that, he thought.

He rang the bell. There was no sound from within. The absurdity of his mission touched him, but he brushed it away. It was a lark. He could set a crime in this place; no telling how much professional and personal disgruntlement festered behind the endless succession of smartly painted doors. As he waited, a tomato‑red door two fronts down opened and the rear end of a pram issued from within. Then he heard a bolt turning in the blue door and looked round to see it open.

The small woman who stood before him didn’t look at him, or anything else for that matter, as her eyes, clouded with cataracts, had the unsettling milky appearance that sometimes frightens children. “Here you are, Dr. Doyle,” she said cheerfully. “I thought I might find you at my door this afternoon.” She stepped aside, holding the doorknob with one hand and a walking stick in the other. “You are most welcome,” she continued. “Do come in.”

“If you knew I was coming,” he said jovially, passing her in the narrow entry hall, “you know more about my plans than I do, as I only resolved to pay you a visit an hour ago.”

She closed the door, plunging the hall into gloom. “I know gentlemen don’t generally credit the ladies with much capacity for deductive reasoning,” she said. “But it’s my opinion that we are rather good at it than not. Especially where gentlemen’s motives are concerned.” She turned to him, extending her frail, bony hand, which he took in his own, careful not to crush it. “I am Mrs. Blatchford,” she said.

He observed her closely, from the old‑fashioned bonnet fastened over her wispy mouse‑gray hair to her plain Mother Hubbard and clean white apron to the black stockings and practical brogans peeking out beneath the skirt. She was, he guessed, in her sixties, fair complexion, not excessively wrinkled, something Welsh about the downturn at the outer corners of her eyes and the weakness of her chin. She was thin, her spine straight, her movements confident, in spite of her blindness, and sprightly in her manner.

She was a little character, he thought, tucked away behind her bougainvillea‑festooned blue door. This was going to be entertaining. Curious old ladies were one of his strong suits.

“I’m afraid I must ask you to follow me to the kitchen,” she said, as he released her hand. “I have our tea laid out, but I can’t manage the tray.”

“With pleasure,” he said.

Moving quickly, as she was familiar with the territory and doubtless careful that all objects stayed in their places, she led him past the staircase and the parlor door. Doyle set himself to noticing everything, the Chinese silk carpet runner – he’d rarely seen a finer one, very delicate in its colors and smooth in its weave – the embossed wallpaper largely hidden by all manner of pictures: Japanese prints, maps, prints of sailing ships, framed photographs of harbors – he recognized Liverpool and another he took to be Gibraltar – a very good painting of Vesuvius, seen from Naples, and another of Mt. Fuji, with its neat snow‑capped peak. A lacquer chest against the wall, hand‑painted with chrysanthemums in the Japanese style, sported a bowl in the shape of bundled leaves, hand‑painted with chrysanthemums in the English style. A mahogany salver with a few envelopes and cards scattered upon it suggested that, in spite of her blindness, Mrs. Blatchford kept up with her correspondence.

There was more light in the kitchen and a view of the back garden, which was as exuberant as the front. Honeysuckle swarmed over the wall and a shady corner was thick with blue‑green hosta, clumps of wild ginger, and pots of begonias, shiny as porcelain. Mrs. Blatchford skillfully poured the boiling kettle into the pot and spooned in the tea – she accomplished this by keeping one fingertip near the rim of the opening. Sensing his interest she said, “I can see shapes.”

“I wondered,” he said.

“For example, I can see your shape and it is a large one. Shall we proceed to the parlor?”

He took up the tray and followed her back through the hall to the room where the large front window, curtained in old lace, admitted the afternoon light. “Your garden is paradisiacal,” he said. “And very unusual. I wonder how you keep it–”

“With my poor eyesight,” she finished for him. “My husband, Captain Blatchford, planned it, and he brought back many of the bulbs and seeds from his travels. When he passed away two years ago, my niece took over what work there is to do. I’ve been in this house five years and the plants are well established. They don’t need much care, though I do bring in the cannas if it freezes.”

Doyle set the tray on a beaten‑brass table of a Moorish design and took his seat in the plain Queen Anne chair facing his hostess. Here, too, the walls were crowded with pictures of all sorts. In a tall wrought‑iron cage near the window, two canary birds twittered, hopping in their incessant, febrile way from bar to bar. From the large oil painting over the mantel, a serious gentleman with long whiskers and heavy‑lidded eyes gazed past the viewer, contemplating the horizon, or perhaps a distant sail.

“That’s my husband,” said Mrs. Blatchford. How did she know he was looking at the painting?

“Yes, I thought so,” he said. “And Miss Briggs is your niece?” He poured out the tea and handed her a cup.

Mrs. Blatchford lifted the cup from the saucer and held it between her palms. “Matilda Briggs is not her real name,” she said, evidently amused by this fact.

“No. I didn’t think so,” he said.

“We were surprised you didn’t recognize it.”

“Is there some reason I should?”

Carefully his hostess tilted the cup to her lips, making a sucking sound as she sipped the steaming liquid. She lowered it with a soft chuckle. “Sophia Matilda Briggs was the child who disappeared from the Mary Celeste ,” she said.

“I didn’t know that,” Doyle said. “I only know what I read in the papers. I was really just a boy when it happened.”

“Yes, we realized that. We thought – even my husband thought – that you changed all the names and didn’t mention that the child was a girl because you wanted to disguise the facts. It didn’t occur to us that you simply didn’t know the facts.”

Was she trying to offend him? She looked so cheerful and sly. She was positively chortling over her teacup.

“It was a fantastic tale,” he said. “I never intended it to be anything more than that.”

“It was the only story of yours my husband didn’t care for,” she said, “and that was for reasons that will soon be obvious. Apart from that one, he was a great admirer of your work. He read everything you wrote, that is, while he was alive. He enjoyed the Holmes stories, but he really admired your historical novels, and he even said you were better at the sea than anyone, except perhaps Stevenson. Do you know what story was one of his favorites?” She turned her face toward him, blinking her sightless eyes. “I think it will surprise you.”

Mollified by this praise from the dead captain, Doyle gazed up at the portrait of his fan. Was that merriment he detected in those far‑seeing eyes? “Perhaps one of the Brigadier Gerard stories?” he ventured.

“It was ‘De Profundis,’ ” Mrs. Blatchford announced joyfully.

Now it was his turn to chuckle. “That grisly little tale?” he said.

“ ‘The shark is a surface feeder and is plentiful in those parts,’ ” she quoted. “George thought ‘De Profundis’ a perfect gem of a story.”

“Well, I’m gratified to hear it,” Doyle replied. “Though it wasn’t a tale that cost a great effort.” A silence fell as they both sipped their tea. Somewhere a clock was ticking; one of the canaries let out a high‑pitched trill. They always sounded so mad with joy, those birds, Doyle thought.

“Well,” said Mrs. Blatchford, setting her cup back on the tray. “Now that you’ve followed our trail and cracked our code, I’m sure you’d like to know why you’re here.”

“The code did briefly stymie me,” he admitted.

“Until you recognized it as a variant of the message in ‘The Gloria Scott.’ ”

“Was that it? I knew I’d used something like it somewhere.”

“Which, most interestingly, is another tale of mutiny at sea,” she reminded him.

“Yes. I’d forgotten. You have been thorough.”

“Since George passed on and my sight declined, I’ve tried to keep my mind alert, and I have a great deal of time.”

“And your niece …”

“Her name is Annie Blatchford. She is the daughter of Captain James Blatchford, my husband’s brother. He married a Portuguese lady whose family lived in Madeira, and as they had no children, they adopted a little girl from an orphanage there, so Annie is not related to me by blood. James died nearly ten years ago now. His ship – it was the Theodore –was lost with all hands in a hurricane near Mauritius. Then Annie’s mother died two years ago now of pneumonia. Annie was just seventeen. We were both alone in the world, so I invited her to come to me. She’s been an enormous help and comfort to me. I don’t know what I should do without her.”

“And she lives with you here?” Doyle asked.

“Yes. She’s very much the modern woman. She wasn’t here six weeks before she found a position at the telephone exchange. She takes the train in every day and comes home in time for supper. We’ve had good fun with our scheme to entice the great detective to our little hideaway in West Hampstead.”

Doyle flinched at the conflation of his person with his creation, but Mrs. Blatchford’s story interested him, so he let it pass. He found it hard to picture the immobile and chilly Miss Briggs having good fun at anything.

“Annie’s a great reader as well,” she continued. “She reads to me before bed. She adores Mrs. Gaskell and Mrs. Braddon. She writes stories herself and sends them round to the journals. Very pretty things they are.”

Doyle poured out more tea as his interest flagged like a sail entering the doldrums. So that was it. Miss Briggs fancied herself a writer. “Mrs. Braddon is very good at plots, isn’t she?” he said.

“I find her work a bit overwrought and sensational,” replied Mrs. Blatchford. “Just between us.”

Doyle made no response, gazing hopelessly at the canaries. How was he to get to the cab without one of the niece’s stories in his pocket?

“George,” his hostess continued, changing tack, and then, “my husband,” as if there might be some doubt as to her relationship to the captain. “George liked to fancy that Annie might actually be Sophia Briggs. She was three when they took her from the orphanage and that was a year after the ship turned up derelict. So she’s the right age. But there’s no evidence for such a claim. The nuns didn’t know where she was born, or they wouldn’t say.”

Doyle was only half‑listening, consumed now by his desire to get back to the club, but his brain picked up a discrepancy that puzzled it and he asked without thinking, “How did your husband come to know the child’s name?”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Blatchford brightly, holding up one index finger to call attention to her point. “That’s the question, isn’t it? That’s the very detail you need to know to understand why you’re here in this room.”

Doyle smiled, giving in a little to the engaging manner of his hostess. “And what is the answer to this vital question?” he asked gamely.

“George Blatchford,” she said, “was the captain who took command of the Mary Celeste in Gibraltar. He sailed her to Genoa, unloaded the cargo there, and then sailed her back to Boston.”

Doyle looked up at the portrait. “Really?” he said. “I’ve always wondered what happened to the ship after the salvage hearing.”

“She sat on the wharf in Gibraltar for three solid months while that hearing went on and on. Near the end, George was retained by the owner, a Mr. Winchester. It took him three weeks to raise a crew because the sailors were all shy of the ship. All he could get was Basques. She was a bad‑luck ship.”

“And did George have bad luck with her?”

“Not a bit of it. He said she was tight as a drum and a fair sailer. Not much speed to be gotten from her. He had an easy crossing, brought her into Boston without a hitch, and then to New York, where word had got out and a crowd turned up to have a look at her.”

“And he left her there?”

“That’s right. The owner paid him off and George caught a steamer back as he couldn’t find another ship, and he was eager to get home.”

“I see,” said Doyle. But then he didn’t see and he said so. “But that still doesn’t explain why he knew the name of the missing child.”

“No,” she agreed. “There’s still that little missing piece to the puzzle, isn’t there?” Her expression was as smug as a cat before a dish of cream.

“Which you are about to supply,” Doyle concluded.

“If you will please open the top drawer of the chest under George’s portrait, you will find a package with your name on it.”

He did as she directed, crossing to the chest and opening the drawer, which contained only a small brown paper package tied up with a thin black ribbon, his name in its entirety printed across the front in red ink. He picked it up, divining by the heft of it that it was a book with hard covers, not, praise heaven, a manuscript of loose typed pages. He returned to his seat before the lady to await her full explanation.

“As you’ve determined, it’s a book,” she said when he was seated. “Before he died, George asked me to deliver it to you. ‘And don’t just put it in the mails,’ he said. ‘If it goes in the mails some factotum will find it first and consign it to oblivion. You must put it in his hands and give him my fond regards as you do.’ ”

Doyle studied the bold lettering of his name. “And now you’ve accomplished your husband’s mission. And very cleverly, I might add.”

“I’m flattered to hear you think so.” She raised her cloudy eyes to the portrait, as if to bask in her husband’s approbation. “Oh, I do believe George would be proud of me.”

“Do you know how he came by the book?”

“I do,” she said. “And George wanted you to know it as well. He found it under the mattress of the captain’s bed on the Mary Celeste .”

“Good heavens,” said Doyle. “Shouldn’t he have turned it over to the authorities?”

“I suppose he should have. But he didn’t.”

“Does it bear on the fate of the crew?”

“Really, sir. I think that will be for you to say.”

One of the canaries warbled gleefully and his companion joined in. Doyle gripped the package, conscious of a visceral reluctance to open it before the blind eyes of Mrs. Blatchford and the dead eyes of her seagoing husband, who sent, from beyond the grave, his fond regards. As if she sensed his diffidence, Mrs. Blatchford neatly closed the interview.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, Dr. Doyle,” she said. “As you’ve observed, I’ve done my duty. It has left me very tired.” And indeed her little frame sagged in the chair. “And I believe your cab is waiting.”

“Of course,” he said, leaping to his feet. “Shall I take the tray back for you?”

“No, thank you,” she said. “You are so very kind. Annie will be home soon and she’ll take care of it.”

“Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“No,” she said. “I’ll just have a little rest here in my chair. If you don’t mind, I’ll ask you to see yourself out.”

He stood before her feeling enormous and useless, a distinctly unusual sensation. He had been eager to leave, but now he was uncertain how to “see himself out” gracefully. Even the package in his hand felt tentative; it was a slim volume, whatever it was, and his fingers gripped it tightly to keep it from slipping away. He offered his hostess a quick awkward bow. “It has been a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Blatchford.”

She roused herself, extending her hand, which he gently caressed in his own. “I’m honored by your visit,” she said. “And so would my husband be, if he were here.”

“Please give my regards to your niece.”

“I certainly will,” she said.

He turned toward the hall, pausing in the doorway to ask a final question. “Does this book contain the solution to the mystery of the Mary Celeste ?” he asked.

She smiled, nodding her head contentedly. It was the question she’d been waiting for. “Let’s just say it deepens it,” she said.

As the cab pulled away from the curb, he heard the bleat of the train whistle, and by the time the horse had turned onto Dennington Park Road, staggered clutches of pedestrians appeared, plodding along the pavement from a narrow lane that must have been a shortcut to the station. He imagined that Miss Briggs might be among them and pressed his back against the seat, averting his face from the window, for the thought of seeing her – waving to her from the window – had no appeal to him. He remained rigid and aloof as the cab wove through the blocks of increasingly large and respectable houses. “A fool’s errand,” he thought, sliding the package onto the seat beside him. He would have a look at it when he was in his room at the club.

On arrival at this safe haven, he found two messages waiting for him: one from Bennett inviting him to come round for supper, and another from her, a brief billet‑doux, expressing her joyful anticipation of their meeting on the morrow. Amid lively fantasies, some charming, others perhaps grave, but with honorable conclusions, he climbed the carpeted marble steps to his room, where his bed was made up, the linen clean, the curtains drawn, and a pitcher of water waiting on the corner table next to a decanter of claret. He dropped the book on the desk, opened the curtains to let in the cool, damp, not particularly fresh air, poured out a glass from the decanter, and sat down to his task. As the breeze lifted the curtain liner and the sound of a distant piano drifted into the room, he had a moment of deep satisfaction with his lot. He adored his family, his house, his position, but it was also a delight to be alone, in his room in the great city, as free of cares as a bachelor, and with the promise of a romantic encounter with one – a most beautiful, talented, adoring, and patiently devoted one – whose chaste kisses would leave him both exhilarated and sick with love.

He took up the package and loosened the ribbon, which came free at once. The paper sprang open, and there was the book, a black cloth cover, with a red ribbon marker and gilt edging across the top – a plain, masculine‑looking journal, such as he occasionally used himself. There were pale stains marking a rectangle neatly centered on the cover, as if a label had been pasted there and fallen away. A purplish smudge near the lower outside edge looked, upon examination, more like jam than blood. He opened the cover to the marbled end pages, which were lightly foxed with age. It did appear to be an old book.

But, he thought, anyone could buy such a book for a few pence at a street market, and if it looked as if it had been lying in a storeroom for years, that was because it probably had.

He turned the page and read the designation, written in brown ink in a round feminine hand.

The Log of the Mary Celeste .

As if a fierce skirmish were imminent, a battery of defenses rushed into place. The peculiar Miss Briggs, who wrote pretty stories, the elaborate device to get him to the outskirts of town, the complex explanation of the provenance of the book, the presupposition that he must take an interest because a seafaring man who admired him thought he must. Was it possible that the book he had before him was an original document, squirreled away for twenty‑six years by a captain who had failed in his duty to deliver it to the proper authorities?

Or was it simply another hoax, the desperate ploy of a poor, ambitious young writer, just as he had been, who schemed, just as he had schemed, to captivate the fickle attention of the public by tying a painter to the taffrail of a famous mystery ship?

He turned the page and read:

Pier 50, East River, New York

November 1, 1872

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 601