The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle Page 23

  You’ll say Hyde is a monster, and that’s true. But so I am a monster. When first I met him, I knew only that he was the doctor’s factotum. I soon learned that Guest exercised some power over him that made him a prisoner, even as I was. In our private moments we plotted together how we would rid ourselves of our gaoler. Even when I came to realize what Hyde was, that his prison was the face and form of Gabriel Guest, I never thought of them as the same man. If Guest withheld the poison from him, Edward would be snuffed out like a candle. If he withheld the antidote from me, I might wind up like Betsy Chubb. I was too cowed to fight.

  Not Edward. He began to test the bars, to force his way out of the cage even when Gabriel refused to take the formula. He claimed it was his soul that properly owned the shared body, that Gabriel Guest was only an empty shell. He fought tooth and claw. But eventually he would find himself exhausted, or on the run, and then he needed the antidote. He did not trust Guest’s servants in Montague Street, or the landlady in his Soho rooms. He asked me to keep a small cache of the antidote with me. There were occasions when he would contact me, desperate, begging me to bring him a dose, in whatever hellish corner of the city he might be hiding. I accepted this trust, but I loathed seeing him transformed back into the smirking doctor.

  Then the cargo ship Mahratta went down off the Goodwin Sands. Gabriel was terrified. Without the Punjabi strain of ergotamine, he could manufacture no more antidote. He sent Edward to carry off the cache he had entrusted to me. He failed, as you remember, but then I felt doubly betrayed. I struck back in anger. I arranged to meet Edward, promising him all of the antidote I possessed. Then when he was gone from home I stole into Gabriel’s laboratory and adulterated his supply. I vowed to take no more myself. That was when I took to my bed, and allowed no one to visit me. Over the course of the next few days, my body began to stir and change again, and the face in the mirror hardened into that old familiar face that I had discarded so wantonly. I didn’t know if I would survive the change. I knew what had happened to Betsy Chubb and Nancy Kelly. I kept a vial of the antidote by my bedside. That cowardice was my undoing.

  Edward came to me again in the night. He found me in the throes of delirium and injected me with the antidote. He must have meant it as an act of mercy. What cruel mercy! Again I was torn apart body and soul by the hellish drug. I feared I would never have the strength to fight again.

  And then they told me my poor Freddy had been killed. It wasn’t Edward’s fault. It is his agony that makes him lash out, I know, but what good is it to say it? No one around me is safe anymore. My guilt has become insupportable.

  Most of this you had already gleaned somehow. Perhaps I should have confessed it all, but would you have believed my story? Can you believe it even now? I have confided in the colonel instead. He took me at my word. He is the only man on earth I trust.

  Thank you for showing me what I must do, Mr. Holmes.

  ELIZABETH DOOLITTLE.

  We sat in silence for a time, each trying to absorb the facts of Eliza’s confession. Then Mrs. Higgins rose to her feet. “Well, it appears my son’s faith was misplaced. His naiveté and sentimentality have betrayed him as they did his father. Still, I had hoped for more from Miss Doolittle, and especially from Colonel Pickering. Indeed, since you were obviously deep into my son’s counsels, I will admit that I had entertained the possibility I might one day call the girl my daughter. But one cannot make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, no matter how convincing the illusion. As for that fellow Guest, I never cared for his manner.”

  That was her final word on the subject. She made ready to go. We exchanged pleasantries as though her errand had been a mere social call, and we would all meet again at the vicar’s for tea. Then she looked us up and down. “Imagine two old men playing detective among respectable people!” With that burnt offering to the temple of her vanity, she departed.

  I turned back from the door. Holmes was standing with his back to me, staring into the fire.

  “Holmes! Eliza is aboard that ship without a drop of the antidote! Will she survive the crossing?”

  “Damn Eliza,” said Holmes quietly.

  I strained to hear him aright. “What did you say?”

  “And damn Pickering and damn the Abydos, may it sink to the bottom of the sea as surely as the Mahratta and the Titanic.”

  I knew that his nerves had been strained to the breaking point. Once a case had reached its conclusion, Holmes often subsided into melancholy or worse. “You don’t mean that, Holmes.”

  He turned to me as if nothing had gone before, and said, “Watson, could you check Bradshaw for me? I must return home in the morning. I have responsibilities.” He said nothing more, but went off to bed. When I woke the next morning he was gone, having left a note on the breakfast table.

  WATSON,

  Unable to sleep. Taking the midnight train from Victoria. Please excuse my outburst of the evening. My appetite for the uncanny has never been robust.

  Yr Comrade in Arms,

  SHERLOCK HOLMES.

  I breakfasted alone. The workmen would be in soon to replace the surgery door. Admiral Nelson was retired to my bedroom. The skeleton went into a cupboard. In the afternoon I would see patients.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  That was the unhappy note the affair ended upon, or so I believed at the time. The Great War came and went, taking the lives of a generation of young Englishmen, leaving a nation bereft of its future. It was on a bitter winter day in 1919 that I received a visit from an unexpected, unwelcome guest. He stood on the icy step, dressed in a soldier’s greatcoat with the badge of the Royal Fusiliers, holding his wasted frame up on crutches.

  “You don’t remember me,” he said.

  “Can’t say I do.” I had assumed that he was collecting subscriptions for wounded warriors.

  “My name is Mead, sir, Cyril Mead. I was for a time valet to a Dr. Gabriel Guest. You attempted to question my master once in connection with a murder investigation. You and another. Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I believe it was. I turned you away.”

  I remembered him then. He had never looked young, but now he seemed almost a specter. “What is it you want from me?” I asked gruffly. I did not want to feel pity for the man.

  “You wanted information from my master at the time. My master was a very secretive man, and I was not in his confidence. But one sees. One suspects. One wishes one could . . . atone, even though one has committed no actual crime, do you see, sir?” There was a shine in his eyes, in spite of the cold.

  “You’re not here to ask forgiveness, are you?”

  “I’m here to give you the information you asked for.” He withdrew a bundle of papers bound up with twine from inside his coat. “I warn you, sir. It is terrible.”

  “What do you want for this information?” I asked, still suspicious.

  “I hope to sleep at night.”

  I took possession of the bundle from him and he went away in ghostly silence, his crutches leaving pockmarks in the snow. I never saw him again. I hope he has found the peace he sought.

  I sat down before the fire and cut the bundle open. I began to read.

  My name is Gabriel Guest, a physician by profession, a scientist by avocation. My father was a grey little man in a grey little situation, clerk to a solicitor named Utterson, himself the greyest of all the grey men ever called to the bar in grey London town. My mother was no more than a shadow. She vanished in the noonday sun.

  There was but one figure in my childhood who stood out from the dreary fogs of my youth, one of Utterson’s clients, a tall man with flashing eyes and a face that shone like hot coals. His name was Henry Jekyll.

  As I read, the evening shadows began to gather round me, and the fire died down. I found myself listening to the sounds of traffic in the street, rendered alien and remote by the soft hissing of the snowfall and the steady beat of wind upon the glass. There was the rustling and scratching that might have been mice in the walls or something more, and the crea
k of floorboards announcing a visitor who never arrived. I found I had read through several pages of Guest’s writing without the slightest idea of what they contained. It seems childish now that

  I report it, but the advancing shadows had returned me to that night when the face of Sherlock Holmes, contorted by the Hyde elixir, had leered at me out of the darkness, and I’d had to fight for my life against my best-loved friend. I set aside the documents, rose, and built up the fire. I turned up all the lights in the house, trying to chase away the phantoms of the past. I tried to settle in and pick up where I thought I had left off:

  Higgins planted the thought in my mind: what effect might it have for a subject to take the antidote without ever having been subjected to the formula? Test subjects were near at hand. The Women’s Hospital is just down the street from the rooms I had picked for Hyde. I chose women because they would be more easily manageable than men, and less likely to have any defenses. Young single women are a disposable commodity in London, as are soldiers in India. I sought out the lowest of the low, and the streets of Soho yielded them up to me. Nancy Kelly, Susan Wallace, Betsy Chubb, Fanny Pritchard.

  No. I stopped and put the papers away. The awful story of Guest and Hyde was not one meant to be read alone on a storm-tossed night in London. There was more in the bundle: a letter from old Utterson, and some sort of testimony from a lawyer named Lanyon, but they were concerned with Henry Jekyll, the first Hyde, the originator of the cursed formula. There was a lengthy apologia penned by Jekyll himself. Finally there was the formula, printed out by itself on the last page, as neat and innocent as a recipe for apple strudel. All of it could wait. I would go down to Sussex, and see my old friend Sherlock Holmes. We would read it together. Spring would be knocking at the door in Sussex.

  I had not seen Holmes since just before the war. Strange rumors had come to me through various channels of a drastic change in the great man’s habits. He dabbled in spiritualism, some said. There was talk of séances and experiments in psychic phenomena taking place under his roof. It was even said that he had placed an article in The Strand arguing the veracity of the Cottingley fairy photographs. In public I dismissed such stories as idle gossip, but privately I had been troubled. We had not spoken of the Doolittle affair in all that time, and I hesitated to remind him of it. I sent him a wire to broach the subject. The reply came swiftly:

  COME AT ONCE.

  HOLMES

  There was little to mark the passage of years in Sussex. It was a bright afternoon when I arrived, though a chill breeze still combed the grass on the downs. The garden seats before the villa had gone green with moss. Ivy stirred upon the kitchen wall. There was a fountain plashing in the middle of the courtyard now, with a mermaid perched atop it, a bit of whimsicality that seemed out of character for Sherlock Holmes. But the bees were loud as ever and the sitting room was the same cheerful mess. Holmes still gazed at me with those same probing eyes and sardonic smile. When I handed him the bundle of papers, he touched the twine as fondly as if it were a violin string.

  “How are the colonel and Miss Doolittle?” he asked me.

  “They survived the voyage, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  He laughed. “Forgive me, Watson. I was angry when I spoke those words. Before that day, my practice had always been confined to the realm of the possible. My deductions were straitjacketed by logic and probability. I was wearied almost to death by the trivial puzzles presented by the mundane crimes you so faithfully documented. The resolution of the Doolittle case opened an abyss before my feet that filled me at first with terror. But in time I came to realize that the realm of the supernatural afforded me broad new scope for investigations. My pulse has quickened once again.”

  “The supernatural? You don’t mean séances and ghost photography and all that parlor spiritualism, do you?”

  “Call it what you will, Watson. We march together hand in hand with those who have passed before us. I have seen them myself, communicated with them myself, here in this very room beneath this roof. There is no death, only a transformation. It was Edward Hyde who first drew back the veil for me.”

  “But there was nothing supernatural about that!” I protested. “That was science! Twisted, perverted in intent, but science all the same. You analyzed the formulae yourself. We both witnessed the effects.”

  “We witnessed a man shed his outer skin and a gibbering ape step forth. That you call science. But every day men slough off their physical forms to liberate their spirit bodies. That you call superstition. It is all one to me.”

  I did my best that day to dissuade Holmes from his newfound enthusiasms, but he was as serenely confident in his explications of the spirit world as he had once been in his powers of observation and deduction. And I could not deny that the old eagerness that had once fueled his greatest successes as a detective had returned with a vengeance. He was once again the hound upon the hunt, though the malefactors he hunted were all beyond the grave.

  He drew a chair close to the fire. I followed suit. He untied the string and leafed through the pages. At one point he stopped and put his hand palm down on one of the pages, as though he were probing for a pulse. Then he smiled, shook his head, and tossed the entire manuscript into the fire.

  “Holmes! Are you mad?” I cried. I started toward the fire, but he held me back as the flames took it hungrily.

  “What need to read it, John? This manuscript bells at us like a pack of hounds.” Holmes smiled serenely. “Shall I tell you what I hear? Do you not hear it yourself? The voice of Gabriel Guest, a motherless boy who despised his plodding father, Utterson’s clerk, and worshiped Dr. Henry Jekyll, a perfect stranger, but a man so full of dark purpose that his face was a palimpsest of corruption for those who could trace it. Jekyll disappears, the father dies, Utterson dies, and still the boy burns for that dark purpose. Somehow Jekyll’s papers come to him, all his secrets laid bare. But the mightiest secret of all, the one he cannot decipher, becomes the lodestone of his future. It leads him to the study of medicine and chemistry, leads him to the army and India. It spawns the grotesque experiments on the soldiers under his charge. And once he has the key, once he has the formula, it leads him back to London to reenact the debaucheries of Edward Hyde. He even adopts the same name in homage to his private Baphomet. And like Faust before him, he believes he can control the demon he has summoned.”

  Moriarty on the windowsill started cawing at something outside and would not be quieted till Holmes took him up and set him on his shoulder. I watched Guest’s papers blacken and curl away in the fire.

  “But Eliza?”

  “I fancy it was Higgins who first put that in his mind, or at least fanned the flames. What could the antidote effect by itself, they wondered, in the absence of the formula? Could they not turn a girl of the streets into a drawing room angel? Guest worked upon the four women, Chubb, Kelly, Wallace, and Pritchard, and he was gratified by the results. But he cast them all aside when Higgins found Eliza Doolittle.”

  I could do no more than stare open-mouthed. Every word that Sherlock Holmes had spoken rang true. It was either the finest piece of deduction he had ever propounded, or the manuscript indeed had spoken to him from the fire. For sanity’s sake, I chose the former proposition.

  Holmes moved to the door and took his coat from the peg. “Come away from the fire, Watson. It will take time for the miasma to dissipate. I think we could do with a stretch of the legs, eh?”

  We stepped out of the house, and the wind from France hit my face. Then a sense of loss welled up in me like a stone in the heart. “But you’ve destroyed any proof!” I wailed.

  “Who shall we prove it to, John? Our poor England, indeed all of Europe, has known such atrocities in the last few years as neither Guest nor Jekyll could summon from the iciest depths of the Infernal. They need no proof. The poison gas, the zeppelin bombardments of helpless cities, the submarine murders, the scattering of disease germs, are they not proof enough of the atavism of the hum
an race?”

  His words were full of despair, but he spoke as dispassionately as a chemist detailing the results of his latest researches. He stretched his arms and cracked his knuckles together.

  “Shall we walk down by the shore? Climactic conditions should be excellent for mermaid sighting.”

  The afternoon sun beckoned on the cliffs, and the wind promised to wash away all nightmares. I followed him down to the sea.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  There was one more thing I had to do. Holmes had not asked me to, nor had Pickering. I did not do it for Eliza, or for Freddy. I did it for four young women whose lives had been thrown away, whose names were no more to me than yellowing newsprint.

  It was a biting March day when I knocked on the door at Wimpole Street. A rather frowzy housemaid whom I had never seen before answered the door.

  “Who shall I say is here, sir?”

  “Er, is Mrs. Pearce at home?” I stumbled.

  “Martha Pearce? Cleared out before the war, I heard tell, and all her people with her. If you’re wanting Mrs. Pearce, you’ll have to run down to Ipswich. Except that’s not her name any more. Married some fellow, I heard. Only been here six months myself.”

  “I wanted your master. Professor Higgins still lives here, does he not?”

  “He does indeed, and keeps us all at sixes and sevens. A right slave driver he is, sir, and I don’t care who knows it.”

  “May I speak with him?” I gave her my name and she left me standing in the hall. I stood there a good long time, recalling all that had happened in that house. I wondered if I had been forgotten. Eventually Higgins appeared, in an old smoking jacket and slippers, scowling at me.